Public Enemy is loosely the story of John Dillinger, a bank robber so prolific he single-handedly prompted the creation of the modern FBI and the first interstate crime laws. He was charming, good to the people, loved his girlfriend, and stuck to a specific code of honor. At least, that's what the movie producers thought of him.

In reality, John Dillinger was a thief and a murderer. He slept with any woman he felt like, abandoned his girlfriends to life in prison, and wantonly killed anyone who got in his way. In Hollywood's version of the universe, however, he was a good guy who just happened to steal instead of work in an office. He's even shown giving a disapproving frown to Baby Face Nelson when Nelson shoots a cop, though later in the movie Dillinger laughingly shrugs off a question of how he sleeps at night with all the men he's murdered.

The whole movie is done fairly well, though they run into a problem with the wardrobe and the casting. Take 15 generically handsome men, put them ALL in brown overcoats and fedoras, have them ALL adopt strained, vaguely Midwestern accents, and then ask an audience to tell them apart? Not likely. At one point I thought one of Dillinger's men had turned on him and gone over to the cops, but it turns out one of the cops looks a lot like one of Dillinger's friends.

The movie itself is very long, which makes it even more strange that there's only two bank robberies in the entire thing. In fact, there's only four crimes of any sort: two bank robberies and two jailbreaks. John Dillinger was the most notorious bank robber of all time, robbing hundreds of banks in dozens of states, but all we see are two in Chicago, ostensibly years apart. Plus, the last 10 minutes of the movie are filled with mostly images of Dillinger...watching a movie. Yes, it's symbolic, but cut out half of that, and show me a montage of Dillinger robbing 3 dozen different banks. If I see him stealing more than $80,000, I may understand why the FBI formed an entire DIVISION just to hunt him down.

Speaking of the FBI, the scenes involving the Bureau were strained. One of the movie's opening scenes consists of J. Edgar Hoover begging an Appropriations Committee for money. He is rebuked by the committee chairman asking "how many men have you, personally, arrested? You are shockingly unqualified, aren't you sir?" The correct response to that is NOT to slink out of the courtroom, as Hoover did, but rather to say "I've personally arrested as many people as you've personally collected tax dollars. I am an administrator, it requires a different set of skills." The rest of Hoover's conversations are equally ridiculous. He's portrayed in the movie as having no backbone when confronting superiors, and being a jackass to his subordinates. Not only that, but he and Christian Bale's character continuously refuse to take advice and allow Dillinger to escape over and over.

If I were going based on the movie, this is what I got from the story of John Dillinger: He robbed a couple of banks over the course of around 6 months. The FBI tried to stop him, but since the FBI employed nothing but morons and assholes, they let him escape through sheer incompetence over and over. When they finally DID manage to arrest him, entirely by accident, he walked right out the front door of the jail. Finally, someone ELSE had to catch him, which the FBI took full credit for.

In short, the movie is entertaining, but you NEED to watch it twice. Afterward, read the Wikipedia entry on Dillinger so you know what REALLY happened. The movie is surely entertaining, but a couple of changes to the writing, some more actual bank robbing (there were 6 minutes of bank robbing in 160 minutes of movie), and some way to distinguish the characters would have pushed it up higher in the rankings.