The characters in Michael Mann movies are always driven - almost literally so, in the case of Mann’s latest movie Ferrari, which casts Adam Driver as Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari. More often, Mann is fascinated by people - more specifically, let’s face it, by men - who are obsessed, battle-hardened pros, doing the thing they were put on Earth to excel at, even if they could wind up dead or in jail if they don’t stop. The results have been some of the most thrilling movies of the past five decades.
You know a film-maker is good when their debut sets out their core vision in its purest form, and Mann’s pared-down 1981 picture, Thief, does just that. James Caan is a Chicago safebreaker who, typically for a Mann anti-hero, is on the edge of escaping from a world he both loves and hates. As Caan’s character plans one last heist but is beset by cheats and rotters at every turn, Mann creates his signature world: a menacing, rain-lashed city, a shimmering score by Tangerine Dream, and electric tension.
Mann refined all that in 1986’s Manhunter, which is a good shout for the best screen version of Hannibal Lecter, even though the Brian Cox take on author Thomas Harris’s cannibalistic killer isn’t all that prominent. The movie tracks criminal profiler Will Graham (William Petersen), whose work involves getting inside the mind of a killer, at the risk of losing his own; the smothering sense of dread is masterfully layered by a director finding his best form.
Our vote for the number one Michael Mann film, though, goes to his biggest, boldest, most Michael Mann-ish film: Heat, which was big news in 1995 because it featured Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the same movie, but is even better than its casting suggests. Paying equal respect to the professionalism of both Pacino’s cop and De Niro’s crime boss, it has nuanced characters and destructive action, Los Angeles looking more knackered and desperate than any previous Mann cityscape, and dialogue that’s very nearly overcooked, but not quite. The De Niro/Pacino face-off does not disappoint, either - it’s a true modern epic.
Mann continued his obsession with bad men roving around diseased urban sprawls with the sensational Collateral, featuring perhaps Tom Cruise’s most malevolent role as an assassin who ropes in Jamie Foxx’s taxi driver to help with a series of tricky jobs, and Miami Vice, which reboots the TV show where Mann’s career started but is nowhere near as cheesy as the source material.
Then there are the films that deviate from the template: gloriously, in the case of deadly serious whistleblower drama The Insider, somewhat less serious Nazi monster romp The Keep, and sweeping historical drama The Last of the Mohicans, which superficially at least is nothing like your average Mann movie. Even his less successful outings, like the oddly muted boxing biopic Ali and the actually a bit underrated cyberthriller flop Blackhat, are bursting with cinematic craft and alluringly single-minded characters who, because they are all dead set on achieving their goal, act as mirrors to the director himself: when Michael Mann makes a movie, he means it.
