He was checking in movies when I came to the register and was amazed at coming across a copy of “Public Enemies.” It’s been impossible to keep on the shelves, he said, and seeing the kid-on-Christmas look on my face, realized that copy wasn’t going to make it there either.

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, burning bright, a smirking, criminal twinkle in his eye, fedora on his head and a submachine gun slung to his side! Marion Cotillard as finger-wave coiffed Billie Frechette, the half-French, half-Indian coat check girl who loved him. Christian Bale, bringing a romantic brand of surliness, far more appealing than his character’s name — Melvin Purvis. Billy “I am a golden god!” Crudup as meticulous, humorless, Cheney-esque J. Edgar “I am a Golden Girl” Hoover.

Somehow, anticipating the film was more exciting than watching the gangsters riding the sideboards of sleek, funereal Model As, blasting fire from their Tommy guns, and dashing through misty forests away from the tree trunk-exploding bursts of a Winchester 10-gauge shotgun.

“Public Enemies” is lost in its massiveness from the start, with its opening text shot: “1933. It is the fourth year of the Great Depression. For John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and Baby Face Nelson, it is the golden age of bank robbery…”

Who’s Karpis? Well, I spotted him once. He was wearing glasses. That’s how scattered “Public Enemies” is. Nelson shows up a few times and he’s kind of a jerk. Purvis shoots Pretty Boy Floyd with a Mauser rifle in an orchard in bloom and Floyd tells him, “I’m Charles.” Hoover asks Congress for money. Dillinger calls Frechette, who tells him her phone’s probably being tapped, and then they show the agents tapping the line and the typed transcript of the conversation we just watched.

Yes, we understand there was a lot of deep research done for the movie. No, we don’t need to see a recreation of Hoover pinning medals on mute 14-year-old boys in a newsreel.

The best lines, mostly Depp’s (the other’s are Clark Gable’s, in “Manhattan Melodrama,” which Dillinger goes to see before he gets popped) are frustratingly stale. “I’m here for the bank’s money,” he tells a bank customer who’s left out his own shabby handful of dollars and coins on the counter. He demurs from kidnapping because of the public’s distaste for the crime, since he has to hide among them. He woos Frechette, saying, it’s not important where you come from, “it’s where you’re going.”

Here is the fizzle of this soporific tale: after the law finally hunts him down, on the sidewalk outside the movies, after the bullet shoots out his cheek, bursting a weird, digital waterfall of crimson, an agent leans down to hear Dillinger mutter something. The agent stands up. What did he say? The agent says he couldn’t make it out.

That’s how the whole movie feels, buried in unconnected minutae and the most mundane aspects of supply chain management, strategy and tactics. Really, FBI agents? You’re going to surround the hideaway house? Some of you will cover the back alley? Never could have guessed. Here’s the gang cleaning and checking their guns like responsible goose-hunters. Dillinger’s bust through a dozen levels of security while escaping the Crown Point, Ind. county jail is as tedious as watching a character commute to work. There’s a bit where the getaway car guy tells them he bored out the engine. One feels a kinship with the cylinders.

Dillinger ends up with one on me — I should have seen the Clark Gable flick too.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.