Unfortunate

Rating: 6/10 (7 November 1999)

This could have been a really terrific movie. The acting was amazing and the story was well written. Unfortunately Michael Mann's direction was awful. I'm not quite sure what happened, since he did such a good job with "Heat." In "The Insider" he constantly uses awkward focusing techniques and hand-held cameras- it's like watching "The Blair Witch Project" but worse because you're trying to follow a complex plot, but people's heads keep shifting in and out of focus, and the camera keeps zooming around in blurry close-ups, that I got dizzy every scene. The movie was too long at almost 3 hours, it could have easily had 30 minutes or so cut. The problem is I really liked this movie. I was looking forward to it, Mann's awkward direction and often out-of-place music cues detracted a lot from this film- I can only honestly give it ** out of **** stars. Its a real shame, this could have been an incredible movie. Pacino, Crowe, and especially Christopher Plummer were fantastic. Really unfortunate.