Being a macho man is fun. Just ask Michael Mann. This is the guy who made Miami Vice (as TV series and movie), Thief, Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Ali, Collateral and now Public Enemies, which is a remake of Heat in everything but name. For Mike, life's about men doing man stuff (ie hunting down crims and having amazing shootouts in urban settings) and grimly waiting for the inevitable consequences (a, like, rilly cool death).

Hey, the guy's entitled to his worldview, and to be fair it's exactly the same worldview as Sam Peckinpah, who's thought of as a great director (well, a great dead director, but being dead is cool, remember). And he's only putting on film what goes through many men's heads anyway. It's just we're a bit embarrassed to admit it.



Public Enemies extracts the John Dillinger story from Bryan Burroughs' epic non-fiction book of the same name, starting with the legendary bank robber being sprung from jail in 1933 in an action sequence that gets things started in a verrrry similar way to Heat's opening security van raid.

What follows is a straightforward chronicle of the Dillinger gang's robberies, arrests, escapes and cat-and-mouse games with the newborn FBI (Christian Bale in a - whodaguessed it? - intense performance as agent Melvin Purvis, Billy Crudup creepy as agency mastermind J Edgar Hoover).

There's also a bit of romance thrown in, just in case any women have accidentally strayed into the auditorium (French actress Marion Cotillard makes a pretty good fist of the Midwestern accent as Dillinger paramour Billie Frechette, who is wooed by the old tommy-gun wielder, then plunged head first into his violent world).



But mainly it's rob/flee/get arrested/bust out/rinse/repeat. It's a simple canvas that allows Mann to let off maximum steam; you can tell that if someone gave him the chance to travel back and be one of these badasses, he'd slamdunk his family, BAFTA gong and pension arrangements in a bin if he thought it would get him to the time machine any quicker.

Production values are quite lavish and bring to mind The Untouchables, but weirdly the movie's shot on digital, which totally squanders the cosumes, in particular. Film adds depth to costume and sets, here the digital makes everything look like Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a horrible mistake, and I hope Mann did it out of last-ditch financial necessity rather than some misguided idea that it would be, like, groundbreaking (the version I saw was admittedly "unfinished" but I can't see it changing much).



Johnny Depp oozes A-list, even if his role is under-written and one dimensional. Mann is obviously quite pleased to have Depp along for the ride and gives him a guzillion close-ups. Bale is all husky intensity, as in Terminator Salvation, and a lot more fun is to be had with up-and-coming Brit star Stephen Graham as the psychotic Baby Face Nelson.

The best bits of the film are Depp's second escape from jail - featuring an excruciating wait at some traffic lights while soldiers mill about in the street - and the climax, a drawn-out affair as the Feds anticipate Depp's emergence from a Clark Gable film to take him down (I think you mean "arrest him" - ed).



There aren't really any surprises in Public Enemies, and as such only scores a Raildog 6.8 out of 10. But in terms of male escapism, you get to be John Dillinger for two hours 140 minutes (and that brief period of history, 1933-36, in which Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, the Barker-Karpis Gang and Machine Gun Kelly, flourished was a truly amazing time, deserving of at least one big Hollywood picture like this) and on that scale it's a healthy 9.

Oh, and for the record, here's your cutout guide to the similarities between Heat and Public Enemies:

1) Public Enemies' jailbreak v similar to van raid in Heat. Both feature a nasty death and a smattering of four-wheel mayhem.

2) Cop hunts bank robber. Both have their own cool gang. Crooks' high-rolling lifestyle revealed in club/restaurant scene near beginning, as is lead crook's single status.

3) Loud gunfight in street following bank robbery. Echoey gunfight effects that only ever appear in, er, Heat and Public Enemies.

4) Bit where one crook or cop dies during post-robbery shootout and someone comes and inspects their bloody body amid the mayhem.

5) Scene where crook drives in darkened street up to lady partner's house, with cops lying in wait. Cops fail to "take him down" (ie arrest him).

6) Touchy feely, sensuous "the passing of life" music by Eliot Goldenthal.

7) Bit near end where main crook and his woman sit in long grass and mutter about the future.

8) Long, tense build-up to a big action scene, with lots of walking involved (the cops following Dillinger from the cinema vs the cops approaching the bank in Heat).

Thankfully there's no "coffee shop scene" in Public Enemies but you know that if MM thought he could have got away with it...

Each year I enjoy sitting on my fat arse at home and watching young people sliding around in the Glastonbury mud while I channel hop from stage to stage, knock back beers and enjoy only having to walk twenty steps to a toilet.

This year, finding myself off work on Thursday and Friday, and with the weekend kind of ooooh how shall I put this, free as well, I thought I’d turn my annual Glasto watching into a bit of fun. How about an MTT spin-up while I’m watching?

Okay, that’s enough intro, because let’s face it, everyone – especially on pocketfives – is doing some kind of bloody “zero dollars to ten thousand dollars” challenge right now, so let’s get started. Suffice to say, yesterday (Thurs) afternoon I stashed a notional $50 into my imaginary marijuana-motif wallet and said let’s see if I can turn this up into a grand before the end of play Sunday. I was expecting to lose the lot in the name of entertainment or else turn some kind of pisspoor $40 profit; I wasn’t expecting to have completed the challenge in 12 hours.




This might not display too well, Photoshop kept crashing, but I did it, damnit.

I came 260/3960 in the $5/20k GTD for $18, 101/2250 in the $5 rebuy for $59.81, and then at 4.45am (erk) 5/1818 in the $5/20k GTD 1R1A for $1,222. I was looking forward to stringing out the challenge, too – will I/won’t I make it, that kind of thing… Guess I’ll just start it again. Right, $50 to $1k, starting 5pm Friday. And I must get round to watching some Glastonbury and having a slash in my own toilet.

10) The delays for tournaments to start. Oh, the delays. And the terrible wait when you bust out early in a home tourney. It’s at times like these that you ponder the big one: WHY?
9) The food. What’s that – you don’t like burger and chips? Then you’re going to die. And the closest you’ll get to fibre in here is the napkin.



<span>Cracking picture, isn't it? Bet the photographer punched the air when he saw how it had come out.</span>

<span>8)</span> Smelly people. There are a lot of them around. Smelly smokers with smoky-smelling clothes, or the vile, shapeless smocks that pass for clothes. Smelly smokers with smoky-smelling clothes who come in from a smelly smoking break and smell of smoke because they couldn’t be arsed to exhale their smelly smoke.

7) It seems more like real money you're winning/losing. That's because it is real money.

6) If you’re not numerically dextrous, not knowing exactly how much your opponents have/you have/is in the pot. “Hmmm, let’s see, so there’s about ten reds and oooh maybe 15 blues. So the reds are a hundred… No, the blues are a hundred, the reds are… Shit, shouldn’t have had that fifth Kronenbourg.”<span></span>

5) Not knowing anyone. You feel a right Johnny No Mates at the breaks, eking out a pint while you read an interview with Roland De Wolfe in German in some mag called Polski Poker! Still, it’s better than muscling your way into some group conversation only to realise they were discussing the last hand before the break, where you knocked out some bloke with a runner-runner-runner-runner-runner bottom two pair, and for you to now be staring at that bloke and hoping that the “BNP” logo on his T-shirt is an illiterate initialization of “Bracknell Poker"...

4) Those torturous discussions about what constitutes a double chance and can you have a rebuy and an add-on or just one or the other?

3) Going home. The long, tilt-fuelled trek home. Oh mama.

2) Disputes. Whether it’s a raiser mucking his cards at showdown or someone moving their chips out with “forward movement”, they never end. Apparently Tim Berners Lee invented the internet just so that he could play online and never have to see a string bet again.

1) The number of hands dealt per hour. This can be expressed as a simple formula: hands dealt online per hour/hands dealt live = ARRRGGGGHHHHH will some flesh-eating parasite come and eat my face off and save me from this hell!!! ARRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

More rubbish like this at my full site, www.raildog.net