The Family Filmgoer
Bullets fly in ‘Enemies’
“Public Enemies” (R, 2 hours, 20 minutes)
A handsome, deep-delving film with moments of shattering violence, “Public Enemies” chronicles how bank robber/folk hero John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) finally met his end at the hands (or triggers) of dogged FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his team. Along the way, we meet other “freelance” criminals and Chicago mafiosi of the early 1930s. In director Michael Mann’s elegant, carefully wrought crime flick, there’s only a hairsbreadth of difference between untethered lawmen and criminals. They’re all heavily armed tough customers putting innocent people in danger. The ambitious head of the new FBI, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), as much as tells Purvis to use fascistic methods in rounding up Dillinger and his cohorts, citing Mussolini’s Italy as a model. The cast is uniformly vivid, including Marion Cotillard as coatcheck girl Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s love. Depp plays Dillinger close to the chest, with bursts of charm and mayhem. In addition to loud, darkly bloody shootouts, the film contains a nongraphic sexual situation, verbal sexual innuendo, implied nudity, rare profanity, drinking and smoking. OK for high-schoolers.
“Ice Age:Dawn of the Dinosaurs” (PG, 1 hour, 27 minutes)
Prehistoric critters still talk modern silliness in this third computer-animated “Ice Age” comedy. “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” is in 3-D, so kids under 8 may really jump when an angry T. rex charges the motley crew of “Ice Age’s” animal heroes. They’re still the same, only more so: Manny the mammoth (voice of Ray Romano), his now-pregnant mate Ellie (Queen Latifah), Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo), and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), along with Ellie’s possum foster brothers Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck).
Diego is thinking he should leave their cozy coterie to be a lone hunter again. Manny’s feelings are hurt by this. Sid, meanwhile, comes upon three large eggs and brings them home to nurture. But they hatch into three gleefully toothy baby dinosaurs. (They eat other baby animals, but are forced to vomit them back up, alive.) The dino-babies’ real mother, a huge T. rex, arrives, grabbing her young and Sid. Besides the T. rexes, kids under 8 may also cringe when a giant flesh-eating plant swallows two of our heroes, though they’re quickly saved. There’s also a kind of skeleton graveyard that’s a bit creepy. The film includes occasional crude humor, toilet humor and mild sexual humor. PG-13:
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”—
The plot is incomprehensible except to Transformers superfans and perhaps highschoolers who like any sci-fi/action hybrids. In addition to relatively bloodless but intense ’bot battles, the movie contains human warfare and enough crude sexual innuendo to make it iffy for middle-schoolers. There is profanity and a joke about an adult getting high on marijuana brownies.
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