In Michael Mann’s greatest movies, the good guys are never really all that different from the bad guys. And make no mistake, they are always guys. The heroes and antiheroes of his stylishly macho films are put through their cat-and-mouse paces in a decidedly grey moral world, rather than a black-and-white one. There’s no room for concepts like right and wrong, they are all lonely nocturnal ambiguity—modern-day Ronin sagas cloaked in a cool shades of gun-metal slate. Just think of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in 1995’s Heat, where these two acting heavyweights play two equally obsessive sides of the same coin. Watching their famous diner tete-a-tete with the sound off, you’d never know who was the cop and who was the criminal. Heat is widely (and rightly) considered to be Mann’s masterpiece—the director’s grand meditation on all of his favorite pet themes: loyalty, honor, integrity, crime, compulsion, loneliness, and the point where good and evil bleed into one another until you’re no longer sure which side you’re meant to be rooting for. It’s a grab bag of leitmotifs that was there from the start in the director’s pair of ‘80s gems, Thief and Manhunter. But as undeniably lean and mean as both of those films are, I’d argue the movie that actually nips most closely at the heels of Heat in the top tier of Mann’s underworld classics is 2004’s Collateral—another violent, nihilism-drenched thriller that, if you squint just a little, seems to exist in the same spiritual… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
Read More
Collateral Is the Most Michael Mann Film of All Michael Mann Films
