It’s been so fucking long, and Blackhat (2015) so unmemorable as to make the wait feel … much longer.
Welcome back, Michael Mann. I’m sure you’ve never been away but a trailer from your immense talents hasn’t been dropped for quite some time.
I have faith in you. I’ve read/seen your résumé many, many, many times.
High hopes for this one.
This blew my mind it was so good. On a simple action-adventure level it’s pure Mann, the framing and the cutting all signature style. What further distinguishes it are the connotations, though, the other world beyond the landscape. Mann always does this, always a subtext in the works. He makes deceptively uncomplicated yarns, but look closer and you unearth what he’s getting at.
This is pre-Revolutionary War (1775–1783) sparked by a Boston Tea Party. Get your head around that. The ending is magisterial, a literal crescendo of dimensions. The last shot – old America, current America, future America. It conveys more about American history than thousands of movies.
On a personal aside, I once synced the incredible Trevor Jones score to a panning shot of Edinburgh taken on a VHS-C camera from the top of Hillend. It was fucking pathetic but we can’t all be Michael Mann.
Essential cinema.
It may not have the character-driven intricacies (and intensity) of Heat (1995) or The Insider (1999), but this is a technically perfect cops-and-robbers flick, pure genre. It takes itself so seriously; indeed, on this recent viewing I did not detect a single comedic moment or anything even approaching irony.
Once again, Mann displays bizarre music choices; why on earth would anyone use Audioslave/Chris Cornell in a movie? It works here, though, something one can not say for Casino Royale (2006).
It’s all about the transcendental moments. Any other director wouldn’t feature the speedboat scene at all but Mann turns it into the movie’s centrepiece. It’s here that Farrell’s Sonny Crockett illustrates everything Mann thinks a … man should be. I imagine the filmmaker would be ashamed at the sight of a grown man crying.
As visual experiences go, the movie is dynamite, action cinema as art. Mann has a thing for dance sequences; here they supplant the need for dialogue. And it doesn’t matter because they are so … cinematic.
And I’ve never seen the TV show Miami Vice so I have no idea how this movie relates to it. Am I missing anything?
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/miami-vice-review/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 