Good cop bad guy / bad cop good guy?

Rating: 8/10 (28 July 2017)

The attraction of this film is obvious in the star-power of its twin leads Pacino and De Niro. Having both come through the 70's and 80's with many career-defining roles with Al usually on the side of the Angels and Bob down with the Devils, this film can be seen as at least a semi-colon if not quite a full-stop to these actors playing these types of parts again. Myself I wouldn't have thought Michael Mann the director to get them in the same movie (even if they only meet up in two scenes), as my preconceptions of Mann back in the mid 90's pretty much begin and end with TV's style-over-content "Miami Vice", meaning I was expecting over-exaggerated characters, extreme situations, improbable connections, loud background music and of course lots of gunpower and violence. Well I got them all, but somehow, overblown and unbelievable as it was, as a movie it still worked.
Mann plays up the duality of these two brilliant but idiosyncratic men, Pacino's Vincent Hanna and De Niro's Neil McCauley on different sides of the law and enables us to look behind the tough-guy personae to at least glimpse their lives away from crime only to discover that these two don't have a life outside the commission of crime by one and the prevention of crime by the other.
Switch leads...? I don't think so. Pacino plays the all-powerful cop in his typical shouty, showy way while De Niro depicts the cool-headed, resourceful crook in his more understated but still highly characteristic way. The main scene where they meet and establish a reluctantly conceded mutual admiration is probably the film's best, two peacocks parading their feathers in front of each other. Of the supporting cast, Val Kilmer makes a big impression as the gun-happy young Maverick in thrall to his boss De Niro and while I don't know much about the two actresses who play the main protagonists' women, both more than hold their own in their scenes with their men.
Of course, with Mann you get big set pieces, superbly staged, with the centrepiece being the bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong and ends up a high-volume shoot out in the shopping mall but there's also De Niro's revenge hit on his gang's snitch and the tense final shoot-out between the big two. Mann's cinematography throughout treats L.A. as almost a character in the movie with numerous night-time city-scapes as De Niro and his new girl seek to somehow rise above what they are and escape their pasts while Pacino is frequently seen in a police helicopter zooming in and out of the city's skyscrapers as he tries to keep a lid on the rampant crime on his beat. Hand in hand with the stylish visuals goes the use of music to add further shade and drama to proceedings with a suitably dense, Gothic soundtrack which almost elevate the film to a modern day grand opera.
It's arguable whether Mann, De Niro or Pacino were ever this good again with all three since then making movie choices they surely would regret in hindsight if they'd thought or cared much about their own legacies. But as late-career artistic hurrahs go, this is about as good as it gets, I'd say.