By Richard Lawson on July 2, 2009 at 6:06 AM So Public Enemies, writer/director Michael Mann’s slick new crime drama, is getting pretty decent reviews, but reading them doesn’t exactly make us excited to see the damn thing. Mann is just so uneven—a technical wizard who ignores everything else. There are whiffs of that sentiment coming off the reviews. Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly says “Public Enemies re-creates clothes, but doesn’t fully fashion the man who wore them.” Which reads to us like the film is just another feat of stylish camerawork and deftly-applied new technologies (Enemies was filmed entirely in HD, for example). Schwarzbaum sends the film to critical no man’s land by giving it a listless B-. What are we to do with a B minus? There’s no doubt that Mann is a supremely talented director—Manhunt is a...
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