Another gorgeous Micheal Mann film, with some glaring flaws

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2004)

I'll preface this by saying that I deeply respect Michael Mann as a filmmaker who is a master of mood who, like Ridley Scott, takes you to a place and lets you feast your eyes on the atmosphere, through the use of composition, color, and general visual excellence weaves a spell where you can almost taste and smell the environment. He can put a revelatory shiver up my spine better than anyone making film today.
But, he will craft a film that has such glaring flaws, he slaps you in the face, defying you to stay connected to the narrative. As a professional cameraman I'm as awed by his command of the image as I am disappointed by these sometimes amateurish disconnects.
This movie, like Heat, starts out so well. You think it's going to be an Oscar contender for sure, then slowly degenerates into a much more pedestrian piece. At least "Heat" kept it's motor moving until the very end, when he capped it with a clichÃ©' "airport runway shootout" .
Ironically, after the brief prelude with Tom Cruise (as Vincent, the assassin) getting his marching orders, there is a brief scene with Jada Pinkett Smith and Jamie Fox that was so touching, so "real", that I think those two should be up for Oscars for their work on this film. They are so effective that Tom Cruise is lucky to be in the same frame with them. Unfortunately, Cruise is really miscast here, he doesn't have enough menace in his "Bad Guy" role to carry the film. Smith, and especially Fox, carry the weight for him.
Jaime Fox does his damnedest, but even he strains to make believable a later scene where his ordinary L.A. cabdriver is unprepared, but forced to stare down a Colombian Cartel boss and a room full of vicious henchmen. C'mon. In this real world we live in, he would have been toast. Slap! It's just a "movie", but Mann weaves such an effective spell with the atmosphere that the incongruities of the script yank you back into disbelief.
But the capper, in my eyes, was the final shootout. In a nightclub, Mann takes a scene which would have lasted, in real time, for maybe ten to thirty seconds, at most, and stretches it out, (without slo-mo, or cutaway to other action), until it seems interminable. People, scared shitless on the dance floor by gunfire inexplicably run back and forth, and back and forth, across the club instead of to the exits. It's a "film student" like flaw that's egregious in the hands of a director I respect so much.
Michael Mann continues to frustrate me, because of his transcendent abilities in imaging the nature of the urban landscape, and then to be seemingly unable to wrap it into a totally believable narrative whole.
Don't get me wrong, if you don't see this film you're going to miss some great, wonderful moments of modern cinema, but I wish one of my all time favorite directors would finally produce his inevitable masterwork. This ain't it, but it'll do.
Go see it.