Basically well crafted but with some flaws

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2009)

Solid performance by Pacino and De Niro, although Pacino was overacting at times - all that yelling and sarcastic talk was a bit over the top... I think the director should have jumped in but he probably figured it's better to let him act the way he wanted. Same applies to Natalie Portman who was quite young at the time and needed some guidance e.g. the scene at the beginning where she is arguing with her mother ('Nooo, I will be late...') needed the director's intervention which simply was not there...
This is not the major problem though - it is the script that was rather contrived and implausible quite a few times. I don't know why Michael Mann was chosen to be both scriptwriter AND director given the fact that he had rather modest CV in scriptwriting...
Anyway, the first major plot hole IMHO is the appearance of Waingro: a team that has been "working" together for a while and seems to be like a big family, just gets a perfect stranger (it remains unclear who and why recommends Waingro to Ceritto!!) as an extra hand to do - guess what? Well, nothing more than hold a gun pointed at stunned and deaf guards... How about just disarming them and tying their hands as they did later in the bank? We are talking about experienced criminals here, not some kind of rookies! The next script problem is van Zant's intelligence: he is smart enough to run a drug money laundering bank but also stupid enough to try to eliminate the gang in the most amateur way - namely, by sending two goofs to an open area without even thinking that there might be someone covering it?!? And then all of a sudden he is scared sh1tless and not leaving his office for days - just because he got a threatening call...
Another problem is the very odd romance between McAuley and Eady. At first I thought that she might be some secret police agent, trying to get to him i.e. a cliché we are used to but still plausible... alas, it turns out it's real love and attraction!! So let me get this straight: there is this young and attractive woman who is "very, very lonely" (?!?) and starts hitting on a guy who is 20+ years older! Every time I see that scene I feel like sinking in my chair - it is so hard to swallow. Same applies to all the interaction between those two for the rest of the film - even after she learns that he is a bank robber, she still agrees to flee the country... my guts were already twisting at that point! Unfortunately, the odd parts don't stop here - although there were some technical advisers to assist the director with the shootout scene in front of the bank, it looked like McAuley and his gang were not surrounded by dozens of armed officers but shooting at rabbits - standing upright and not getting hit as if the police were using blanks:)) Well in reality, they were but hey, we are supposed to believe this is serious:)) Of course, the only one who gets to kill one of the big baddies (Ceritto) is Lt. Hanna: the other cops are just good enough to get killed or wounded.
The final blunder was the corny scene with Hanna and McAuley holding hands... how about a hug? What were we supposed to believe here - that this was just a duel between two gentlemen and one of them was less fortunate? It seemed to me that the film tried way too hard to take side with the ex-cons in general: the scenes with Breedan, the one who was just released from prison and gets treated like piece of junk were there to convince us that it is not their fault if they turn back to crime, it's our hostile society who is to blame... so we are supposed to sympathize with those guys? Yep, this is what they do for living, they can't do anything else as McAuley pointed out... I could have bought that too if they were stealing without killing - which was obviously not the case here.
To sum it up - decent action movie but not at par with the big gangster dramas Pacino and De Niro played in before.