Dillinger

After nine years in prison for robbery, seasoned con John Dillinger (Mark Harmon) nurses two ambitions; (1) to never serve time again and (2) to maintain a high-rolling lifestyle illegally. While his partner Copeland (Xander Berkeley) complains about spacing their heists for optimum impact, Dillinger plots to rescue jail buddy Harry Pierpont (Bruce Abbott). Instead, Dillinger gets recaptured and then sprung from jail himself by recently-escaped Harry, who raises the stakes by slaying a local sheriff (Lawrence Tierney) in the process. As Harry's gang attracts the attention of the Feds, Dillinger tricks his way out of extradition from Tucson to Indiana after another capture by using a fake gun. Sporting a flashy new female companion, Billie (Sherilyn Fenn), Dillinger encourages his crime consortium to take a vacation in Florida, but their retreat is cut short by an FBI raid that winds up killing more innocent bystanders than hoodlums. While J. Edgar Hoover (Vince Edwards) steps up pressure to capture him, nine-lives Dillinger eludes manhunts even after tight-lipped Billie gets jailed. Forcing the cooperation of the landlady of Dillinger's new girlfriend, the Feds intimidate her into identifying Dillinger (who has had plastic surgery) outside a movie theater showing the mobster flick MANHATTAN MELODRAMA. At last John Dillinger receives an inevitable machine-gun reception from the Feds, which ends his crime spree.

Trading in cheap ironies (e.g., the cops are "schlubs"; J. Edgar Hoover is more of a publicity hound than a crimefighter), DILLINGER dresses up an old folk hero in contemporary drag. Accompanied by an excruciating jazz score that fits neither the time period nor a mobster movie atmosphere, DILLINGER is strictly for young videoholic moderns who don't know that much about the anti-hero of yesteryear. Whether ripping off the homecoming scene from BONNIE AND CLYDE or presenting an interchangeable gallery of handsome hoods, nothing about this gleaming gansterama feels right. No sense of depression era verisimilitude ever surfaces, and the criminals' eat-drink-and-be-merry philosophizing rings hollow. More re-enactment than re-envisioning, this noisy but somewhat anesthetized action binge pumps some young acting blood into pickled corpses. Suitably cast as a soul-dead killer, aging pretty boy Harmon doesn't have the panache to embody a thrill-seeking mediaholic. Best advice: skip this film and catch the earlier Dillinger biopics with Warren Oates (1973), or Lawrence Tierney (1945), seen here in a tiny role. (Graphic violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations, substance abuse.) leave a comment