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This week of all weeks, we’re thinking about how death turns a man into a myth. And John Dillinger, shot dead 75 years this summer, became a legend in an era before pop stars. Dillinger the man was a nice enough bank robber who had the savvy to frame his stick-em-ups as social justice. Dillinger the myth was America’s Robin Hood, gunned down brusquely as he and his girlfriend left the movies, his eyes and mind still adjusting back to the real world as his body left it. He represents faithless women and ruthless policemen, proto-celebrity, media smarts and the economic gulf between rich and poor that dovetails with every depression.

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies isn’t a fable. It’s flat and direct, and when a line or two slips out that sounds like it wants to elevate Dillinger’s life into a grand theme, it’s quickly hammered down. But it’s not a biography either. All the facts are wrong, the parties different, the truths scrambled. Here, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is the last of the great robbers. Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson—who actually both survived him—are gunned down early, and start the chain of events that leads to Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) heading the FBI quest to stop Dillinger at all costs. Meanwhile, Dillinger meets Indian reservation beauty Billie Frechette (Marion Cotilliard, her wavering French accent fobbed off as the side effect of a Francophone father), and the two instantly embark on one of those grand Hollywood romances that screenwriters deludedly deem fascinating, even though their uninspired, unwavering commitment is such stuff long naps are made of. (How much more interesting and brave would it be for screenwriters Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman to admit that Dillinger dumped his lady during her two-year sentence for refusing to turn him in?)

Public Enemies is a handsome film, but as empty as a silk hat box. The film loves thick blacks and expensive jackets and taunting furs that make our fingers ache with envy. If only it were about something. The moment of Dillinger’s death is awful, but less for emotional reasons than the gasp of watching a slow motion bullet exit from the front of his face—a detail Mann did get right. It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole film was made for that scene. It’s not a moment for heroes. Dillinger is surprised, then dead. Purvis finally has his moment, and then it’s over in a flash as the gawkers flood the scene and his duties turn from heroism to crowd control.

In an epilogue, Mann tells us that Purvis committed suicide in 1960, as though that has anything to do with Dillinger’s story. It feels like a cheap play for depth, especially when we never see a glimmer of doubt or guilt in Bale’s performance. His Purvis is Batman without the rasp: same Bale, different suit. Bale’s performances have gone increasingly inward ever since he was hailed as Hollywood’s Next Big Thing, but the guy who could once play everything from serial killers to singing newsboys hasn’t emoted in years. But I’m going to give Bale a little bit of a pass as Mann is capable of turning his leading men into well-dressed plywood. Hell, in Miami Vice, he made Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell boring. Even Depp here seems to fight for life. He’s got a few moments of off-the-cuff charm, but largely his Dillinger is passive in his own story. He can rob a bank, but outside of those two-minute stretches, he mostly looks watchful while riding in cars and lets other people tell him who he is. (The consensus is he doesn’t think past tomorrow and he can’t let other people down.)

In the minutes before his death, we watch Dillinger watching Clark Gable onscreen playing a crook in Manhattan Melodrama and Mann presses us to see these two doomed Hollywood gangsters as mirrors. But Gable—even from the distance of one camera filming another camera from seven decades away—is fully alive. And this film, fresh from the studios, is never better than comatose.

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The good news is that the sequel is better than the first. Michael Bay has learned that action film fans like to see action. He’s taken his head out of his keister and his camera out of the Transformers’ tailpipes. Sometimes, you can even see all four limbs of an Autobot as it slugs a Decepticon. The blow makes a satisfying “Kkrasggsh!” For a second, you’re having a good time. Treasure it.

Another thing Michael Bay learned from his start-up Transformers is that audiences don’t have to like a movie to spend buckets of money seeing it. An event franchise that hasn’t yet worn out its welcome swaggers into the summer knowing that there is a month of barbecues ahead where people will be asked if they saw it and will want to be informed enough to say it was crap. Freed from the pressures of making something good, Bay can fill up the space between battles with trash, and convince himself and us that everyone else eats it up. When we go to a lousy popcorn movie, we convince ourselves that the strangers around us loved it. They-not us-are to blame for Bay’s trust in the lowest common denominator. As though our money arrives in his billfold with an asterisk.

The script is written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the last two fresh off Star Trek, where they must have burned off their inspiration), and at least in this sequel there’s slightly more of the things that most scripts have, like characters and plots. There’s also more idiocy. Thought the dog peeing on Optimus Prime was lame? Now there’re two dog-humping scenes and a third where a microbot has its way with Megan Fox’s leg. Thought the jive-talking Jazz was borderline offensive? Now there’re two of them, Skids and Mudflap, who despite their red and green paint jobs are unmistakably meant to be black. Worse than their gold teeth and cackling accents is what they say, like “We don’t really do much reading.” Thought the script showed little understanding of the concept of Transformers? Here, an aged Decepticon named Jetfire boasts that his father was the very first wheel-never mind that it was made of wood or stone. At least the Transformers have overcome their masturbatory fixation on shouting their own names, but the dialogue replacing it is swiped from playground bullies or Vegas comics.

The thrust of the story is that Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is off to college, his tearful goodbye with Bumblebee interrupted when Bay gets restless and splices in a shot of Fox’s white panties as she changes clothes outside the garage. Bay’s impatience with human emotions continues to show; the main arc for Fox and LaBeouf is who will say “I love you” first, a tired saw the flick shoves in whenever the two are alone and have to speak. They’re also facing the danger that LaBeouf will replace his hot mechanic honey with someone college-educated, but luckily for the couple, the one co-ed putting the serious heat on Fox’s man turns out to be a disguised Decepticon with a deadly chainlink tongue (an Attracticon?). Meanwhile, the military and the Autobots-led by Optimus Prime channeling a godlike Daniel Craig-have formed an alliance to take down the sporadic Decepticon insurrections, which may or may not have something to do with a pyramid in Egypt. (Okay, okay, they do.) The 40-minute climatic desert tussle must have had a big budget for goats and chickens, which along with diminutive actor Deep Roy stand in for the majority of the locals.

Other delights (deliberate and not): Shia’s girlish scream. Megan’s gift for running while holding hands. Hurricanes of harmless shrapnel. Small ‘bots that all look like Lil Wayne. A jaguar-shaped Decepticon who spits up ball bearings for hairballs. That New York, a city where last week the Times ran a piece on a famous stray cat, takes no notice of an Autobot on the Brooklyn Bridge. An extended scene of Sam’s mom eating a pot brownie. Ponderous inanities like when a soldier muses of Optimus, “If God made us in his image, who made him?” It’s dreck, but face it-we’ll all pay for the displeasure.

Click here for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in the IE Weekly

Just when you’d given up on an interesting take from Hollywood on the Iraq War, Kathryn Bigelow brings a three-man bomb squad where Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) debates shooting his Commanding Officer William James (Jeremy Renner) for being too committed to defusing explosives. Sanborn and specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) have just lost one C.O. (Guy Pearce) to a hidden bomb. Now, with only a month before their safe stateside return, their new leader seems determined to lead them all on suicide missions. Their mornings begin with a countdown of how many days they have left and the introduction of their next challenge—bombs strapped to a man, bombs hidden in a car, bombs hidden under dirt, bombs hidden in a corpse—all of which James insists on dismantling without body protection and without letting his team get a comfortable distance away. (“If I’m going to die, I want to die comfortable,” he grunts.) Bigelow can sure shoot a crackerjack scene that makes you ball up your fists and suck in your breath, and screenwriter Mark Boal (who helped create one of the Gulf’s other solid scripts, In the Valley of Elah) knows our American love for mavericks is bound to get tied in knots watching James’ cavalier approach to everyone’s death. He’s a hero and a menace. In an early nailbiter, James insists on defusing a car bomb they’re content to explode; he swaggers back to the car and gets a punch in the face. There’s racial tension between Sanborn and James, and for that matter between everyone in the U.S. military and every citizen of Iraq, both of which Bigelow deals with flatly as facts of cultural barriers and suspicion. Like many modern Iraq war films, The Hurt Locker captures the suffocating paranoia of a civilian enemy. It also captures the tedium. The film’s best shootout sequence ends with the team staring for hours at a distant desert hideout, too afraid there might be one last living sniper to kneel down and grab a juice from their backpack. Whenever the squad is off duty, the flick collapses into cliché, particularly due to the timorous and unstable Eldridge whose every line feels ripped from a simpler, flatter propaganda piece. Bigelow ends with a flashback or flash-forward where we visit James back in the states and see the man who wades into the danger of the desert as casually as a cruise ship swimming pool stand bewildered in a cereal aisle. And suddenly, in what looks like weakness, we get his bravado. This “a-ha!” moment feels so good we half wish it’d come early enough to watch his character through this new lens. But we also sense that what we’re meant to take away is that civilians will never deserve to claim we understand.

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At 24, Jennifer Lynch proved she was daddy David’s smart little girl with her first film, Boxing Helena, a nasty comedy about a beauty (played by Sherilyn Fenn) who refuses to submit to her wormy kidnapper and stalker Jeremy Irons—even after he cuts off her limbs. Lynch’s second film comes a decade later, a tidy thriller about two FBI investigators (Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman) interviewing three witnesses the morning after a grisly murder. Two of them—a junkie (Pell James) and a real prick of a cop (French Stewart, genuinely menacing)—have reasons to blur the truth. The third is a somber 8-year-old girl (Ryan Thompkins) who’s just seen her family killed, including mom Cheri Oteri. Lynch has fun upending casting conventions, hiring network comedians for straight roles and square do-gooders as the surprise psychokillers. Two-thirds of Surveillance is taut and absorbing, and her victims’ flashbacks heavy with dread, yet the cheap third act twist feels tacked on from a lesser talent, say one whose last name rhymes with ‘Pshyamalan.’ Lynch shares her father’s inability to end a film, but at least she also shares his knack for putting together from ensemble to soundtrack to camerawork the potential of a great movie, unrealized.

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A dreadlocked ringmaster tells a misfit girl to flee the land of the corporate zombies, where businessmen in masks and suits sprawl half dead before tombstones made of suitcases. And she does, committing suicide to descend from the ceiling of the venue’s big top tent to the underworld circus of the fully dead, whose acts include suicides hanging themselves from trapezes and a drowned sailor and his wife contorting through a boneless, weightless sexual dance. Later, a troupe of dead brothers make brilliant use of a trampoline and an oversized photo frame, and a phalanx of hellish Liza Minnellis reenacts Cabaret with flaming chairs. The creative team of Suzanne Bernel, Kevin Bourque and Neal Everett put on quite a show. The 26 performers and seven piece band are fantastic, and fantastically served by Heather Goodman and Mary Anne Parker’s costumes, which have the bravado to make an outfit out of an Elizabethan collar, feathers, a bikini top and knee socks. (The production was born at Burning Man.) And because the stage rotates, there’s not a bad seat in the house, even out in this ex-cornfield east of Chinatown.

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Francis Ford Coppola’s second film this decade is an arthouse gem starring Vincent Gallo as Tetro, the eldest of two brothers wrestling with their estranged father’s legacy in Buenos Aires. Coppola’s name can still draw in fans, first those willing to give him a second chance after 2007’s decorative and empty Youth Without Youth, with more later to come once solid word of mouth spreads.

Tetro embraces what is hazily dubbed “European” cinema—a tradition comfortable with inflating a small story with rich symbolism and emotion. Shot in the luxe black and white of a diamond commercial, the film first introduces us to Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), an 18 year old innocent literally right off the port. (His cruise ship, where he works as something less than a waiter, has docked due to technical difficulties.) Bennie seizes the moment to reconnect with his much older brother Angelo (Gallo), a crank who has rechristened himself “Tetro” and taken a sweet and nurturing therapist named Miranda (Maribel Verdú) as his common law wife.

We know that their reunion is going to change all of their lives—and not just because when Bennie first sets foot in their neighborhood he steps over a fallen banner that blares “Wind Sweeps the Road. You Can Not Go Back.” Privately, Bennie cries over the last letter Tetro wrote him when he ran away from their abusive father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), which promised emptily to return and rescue his younger brother. Meanwhile, Gallo is introduced with the gloom of a Grimm’s fairy tale: minutes before we finally see him, he lurks like a beast behind a glass-paned door.

Coppola extends a timeless magic to the film, which is perfectly set in the cobblestone metropolis of Buenos Aires. People dress classically, meet at cafes and send telegrams. They love the theater, packing in for a burlesque adaptation of Faust and broadcast a play festival as though it’s the glitziest thing since the Oscars. The biggest star in the country is a literature critic; the biggest in the world is a symphony conductor. When a character finally breaks out a cell phone, it’s startling.

At his heart, Coppola has written an old-fashioned family gothic. The secrets at the center pack a near-primitive power, even though they’re as foreshadowed as the family’s continual way of throwing themselves into oncoming traffic. Surprises are few. But I succumbed willingly to the way Coppola handles his material, first showing us flashbacks in bright color, and then escalating the fantasy by turning memory literally into opera and ballet until grand art fights with colorless reality for dominance. In this film, the whole world is a stage, a soap opera grounded by the fantastic, naturalistic cast who show us real people deciding when to fight fate and when to collapse.

Click here for Tetro in Boxoffice Magazine

Evangelicals might take one look at ancestors Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) and decide they’d rather descend from monkeys. Harold Ramis’ comedy is more evolved than the trailers let on, but after a solid hit to the popcorn audience’s vestigial funny bone, the humor retreats into a lazy, generic swamp. Weekend returns should be respectable, but few will excavate it for a second go-round on DVD.

Jack Black’s caveman is as primitive as his usual meatheads, his hair and eyes still wild, his social graces still equal to a stray dog. Here, however, he matches—not clashes—with his surrounding culture, and it’s Michael Cera who can’t get with the program of jackal dances and clubbing crush Eema (Juno Temple) on the head. Cera, too, is the same as ever. He speaks haltingly, adding unexpected pauses to his sentences like a gentle Christopher Walken—he’s so sweet, he talks to berries. But his Oh is harder to please than Cera’s usual virginal ingénues, and after Zed eats the forbidden fruit and gets them expelled from their jungle village, his resentment is a nice sour jolt.

The first half of Ramis and co-screenwriters Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg’s script has fun riffing off Biblical lore and caveman minds. Black charms his love Maya (June Diane Raphael) by making fun of how her parents were torn apart by a pack of wild dogs, and wives and sisters are offered around like after dinner mints. We meet Adam and Eve (Ramis and Rhoda Griffis), Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), Abraham and Isaac (Hank Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and watch Zed and Oh get motion sick from the five-mile-an-hour speeds of an ox-drawn cart.

Once the duo makes their way to Sodom to save Maya and Eema from slavery and hellfire, the humor regresses to swords and sandals slapstick with a cheap and lame overdose of gay panic gags. (Threats to Black and Cera’s posterior or package outnumber actual jokes 2:1.) Chief among the many, many examples of frat humor are Kyle Gass as palace eunuch Zaftig and Oliver Platt’s High Priest, a hairy, horny homosexual letch who takes his makeup tips from that other Christian legend, Tammy Faye Baker. Here, Ramis, the comedy king of Groundhog Day, is slumming. And I’m surprised an off-kilter talent like Cera would indulge him, swallowing his gag reflex when Platt commands him to rub his chest with oil. The last time that joke felt fresh was B.C. It clashes with the script’s closing bold moves, questioning the existence of God and floating the theory that each of us are responsible for our own destiny. I’d like Ramis’ religion more if it didn’t overlap with the Prop 8 fear mongers.

Click here for Year One in Boxoffice Magazine

Woody Allen’s latest seems like a decade and a half late defense of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Except that Allen claims he wrote his script about an old crank who falls for an incredibly young beauty for Zero Mostel back in the ’70s, when the rampaging comedian was still alive and his future bride was still an orphan in South Korea. Allen doesn’t need this slight picture to perform any better than embarrassing, and that’s exactly what it’ll do.

After several years abroad churning out pedigreed B-pictures, Allen has returned to New York for his latest trifle. For now, he’s given up making films that are about anything bigger than a quirky theme and a few dozen one-liners. A septuagenarian—not that he looks much different than he did 25 years ago—the filmography of Allen’s last decade would be good enough to make the career of a younger auteur. But being Woody Allen pictures, they’re always seen through a thick lens that makes them appear either more grand or more cheap than past projects.

In this, Larry David—Allen’s new Woody Allen—plays Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant scientist (he continually reminds us) who cracked up and threw away his on-paper-perfect wife and job. Now a grump whose only friends tolerate him out of loyalty, he entertains himself by berating children, a courtesy he extends to a barely-legal runaway who wheedles him into a place to sleep. Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) is dumb and beautiful. The dumb turns out to be more valuable: she’s literally too dense to accept Boris’ misanthropy. (She sees into his heart, she insists, even though we’re not convinced one’s even there.) But eventually Boris makes her his wife after he comes around to appreciating her blonde, Southern, good looks, the cooked catfish dinners and the way she skips around the apartment in knee socks, pigtails and panties.

What does Melodie see in him? We’re not sure, and for the first thin hour, Allen isn’t interested in asking her. Instead, he turns the implausibility of their romance into the script’s reason to exist and lets the other characters mirror our disbelief. With the entrance of Melodie’s estranged mother (Patricia Clarkson), the film takes an interesting twist. (And with the entrance of father Ed Begley Jr. a few scenes later, the film’s twists seem like Allen racing to slap an ending on his ungainly charmer.) Couples pair up, people evolve and Boris opines the film’s tidy, off-kilter thesis, “The romantic aspirations of our youth are reduced to ‘Whatever Works.’” And for Allen, his career aspirations have done the same.

Click here for Whatever Works in Boxoffice Magazine

In a drainage pipe near a park and a ditch that might be a space-alien breeding ground, unloved Antonio (Joseph Vega) and overly loved Lulu (Alina Phelan) hide out from their normal lives. He’s a teenager escaping his family, which includes a manic mother (Misi Lopez Lecube), who may be lacing his food with poison, and a dad (Chuma Gault) and sister (Jessica Martinez) who don’t care either way. She’s fleeing a husband (Jon Beauregard) so devoted to her he leaves pies in the park for her. “There’s a lot of love in that pie,” Lulu tells Antonio, which means something to playwright Jacqueline Wright, whose allegories here are made of flotsam — her pieces are stitched together with wild images that stir the imagination but don’t quite absorb your emotions. Wright is a clear talent, who delights in the theater medium. Overhead Lulu and Antonio’s hideout, a broken man bandaged from head to foot describes the joy of bashing out brains in a skiing accident and suggests — but doesn’t quite advocate — that we jump off a building. Meanwhile, a lonely lecher finds and hatches a gigantic egg, out of which climbs a pale, naked English-speaking creature who demands freedom and caramels. Sibyl Wickersheimer’s austere set invites movement, and director Dan Bonnell has his cast run — rarely walk — from end to end. But with Bonnell allowing half the cast to use Wright’s dreamlike imagery and language as an excuse to heighten their speech, while the other half recognizes the need to ground the characters with natural performances, the production feels too bipolar for us to commit to caring about why Dad eats paper, why Mom wears Antonio’s clothes and why Lulu pushes away intimacy.

Click here for Love Water in the LA Weekly