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I wouldn't recommend this to people looking for the next LETHAL WEAPON, for sure. I thought it was a great piece of ambiguous filmmaking. I definitely saw a lot more of the Jean-Pierre Melville influence in this than even in other Mann films and that's unexpected for what's billed as a big mainstream movie.
At the core of the movie is the style established in the television show, but with much more dedication. The plot is complex but understandable, yet the actors add absolutely no emotion to whatever they say. You can read a lot into their expressions, but there is nothing there that you can hold onto. The dialogue is very cyclic with the same words and phrases repeated from scene to scene for contrapunctal effect and shaded with slight changes based on context rather than content. This is NOT Mamet dialogue but it follows one of his guidelines: "People rarely say what they mean, but they mean what they mean."
What most people won't like about the movie is that there is very little humor and action. For me, the dedication to the style of the movie is also reflective of Mann's dedication to the seriousness of an occupation that requires unflinching betrayel and occasionally shooting and killing people. If Mann, as a writer and director, takes this movie seriously, then he's not going to give undercover cops a lot of wisecracks. Leave that to Tarantino.
Farrell's performance will likely turn off many people but I really thought he was doing some of his best work. This is very similar to his performance as John Smith in THE NEW WORLD. Rather than doing the mugging that made him famous in roles like Bullseye or the Man in the Phone Booth in PHONE BOOTH, he seems much more human and flawed as Sonny Crocket/Barnett. There is a scene where he mixes business with pleasure in Havana that requires operation on at least four levels. He has to make a deal with Isabelle, his lover, contract employer and target so that he and Ricardo Tubbs/Cooper can continue doing business with her to get to her employer, Montoya. He has to balance the fact that he's a cop who needs to look like a criminal smuggler with the fact that he is also falling in love with her AND he also has to balance the fact that she's falling in love with him as the criminal, and he has to factor in that that will influence the way he bargains. It's not a scene thatyou usually see in these sorts of crime dramas - the uncertainty on the part of the undercover cop as he does his business betraying people who are becoming important parts of his life.
I had a friend who's father was a former ATF undercover cop. He became an alcoholic from the work and, now recovered, counsels other agents. He said that his job consisted of making the closest friends in the world, committing crimes with them and then turning them in. Often the people he arrested would insist that he handle their interrogations since "they could trust me."
In the end, Michael Mann may have perfected his vision of the television show MIAMI VICE from the 80's where style is the substance. I think that a theme running through all his films is that the activity of acting in movies is not that much different from simply living your life. In almost every situation, our personality is a role we play and our interaction with others is some sort of performance. I think that Mann is obsessed with police and criminals for the reason that they are probably the best actors alive and they will never step in front of a camera or win an Oscar. The entire point of the movie is to use music and image to build a series of contexts, true and false, until, in the climax, the facades are stripped away leaving only the struggle for life and death: the violence.
It's not for everyone, but like LADY IN THE WATER, another recent film that discarded conventional appeal for personal vision, I read into the movie a much deeper and affective experience than I've seen in a long time. |
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