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Michael Mann (USA, 1943)
Thief (1981), loosely based on
Frank Hohimer's autobiography
"The Home Invaders - Confessions Of A Cat Burglar" (1975), written by a real-life
criminal (who at one point was listed by the FBI as one of the ten most wanted fugitives) and possibly ghost-written by sci-fi novelist Joe Wolfe,
is a well-orchestrated gangster movie that becomes implausible towards the end
and suffers from the use of annoying slang.
Tangerine Dream composed the soundtrack.
Frank (James Caan) is a master in opening bank safes. He steals jewels and cash
and then hands them to a fence who pays him well enough to support a nice
lifestyle while hiding behind the official identity of car salesman.
His buddy Barry helps him with the technicalities of the heists.
Frank is in love with the cashier of a pub, Jessie.
However, this time the fence is killed, thrown out of a window, before he can pay Frank.
Barry finds out the name of the person who killed him. Frank wants his money
and confronts the instigator of the murder, Attaglia, threatening to kill him
within a few hours. Attaglia shows up with his boss, Leo,
who hands out the money to Frank and offers him a bigger deal.
Leo also reveals that he has been the receiver of the loot of all his heists
and admires his work. Now he wants Frank to work directly for him.
Frank hesitates because he doesn't like to have bosses but then accepts because he intends to build a new life. He also wants to get his old buddy Okla out of prison: Okla told him that he doesn't have long to live.
We see that cops are watching their meeting.
Frank proposes to Jessie who accepts after they exchange stories of their lives:
Frank was in jail for 11 years and Jessie was the girl of a drug dealer who got
killed.
Frank begins working with Leo on the next, bigger heist. He employs a trusted
metal worker to figure out a way to open the very complicated safe of the bank.
Meanwhile, he buys a house for Jessie and tries to adopt a baby because Jessie
cannot have children. They are rejected by adoption agencies but Leo finds a
woman who sells babies and they get their baby. Meanwhile, Frank bribes a judge
to release Okla but Okla dies right away.
The cops take Frank to the station and torture him to find out about Leo,
but Frank doesn't help them. They try to follow him but Frank loses them.
Frank and Barry carry out the heist and deliver the jewels to Leo.
Then Leo goes to collect but has a surprise: Leo only gives him a fraction
of the money that he promised. Frank demands the rest. Leo tells him that he
still has to work for him. Frank refuses and threatens Leo. Later in the night,
Leo's henchmen kill Barry and kidnap Frank. Leo explains to Frank that his
family will die the way Barry died if he doesn't obey.
Frank realizes that his dream of having a normal life will never materialize.
Frank drives home, wakes up Jessie and tells her to leave the house without
offering any explanation. Then he blows up his house, then he blows up
Jessie's pub, then he blows up his car business. Then he breaks into
Leo's house and kills Leo and his henchmen.
Finally, Frank walks away alone in the night.
Tangerine Dream also composed the soundtrack for the horror movie
The Keep (1983), an adaptation of Paul Wilson's novel (1981).
The original the 120-minute film was cut down to 96 minutes.
Manhunter (1986), a De Palma-esque thriller, is based on Thomas Harris' novel "Red Dragon" (1981).
Will is a retired FBI officer who lives in a beach house
with his wife Molly and their child Kevin.
His boss Jack comes to visit him and ask for his help to solve an important case: a serial killer who kills during every full moon.
He accepts and next we see him checking out the scene of the crime, where an
entire family was brutally slaughtered.
At the hotel he watches videos of family life found in the house.
He seems to re-live the event from the viewpoint of the killer and guesses
that the killer must have taken off his gloves at one point.
He wants a special officer to check again the victims.
We learn that Will caught a serial killer three years earlier, a doctor called Lecktor
We also learn that the serial killer leaves bite marks on his victims.
The special officer finds thumbprints that were missed before.
Will would also like to find out what happened to the family's cat that was not found.
Will is approached by nosy reporter Freddy, and Will overreacts throwing him against the windshield of a car. We learn that Will was hospitalized after
catching Lecktor and Freddy sneaked into the hospital and took pictures of Will's wounds while Will was unconscious.
Will decides to visit Lecktor in prison to get rid of his own trauma.
But in reality he wants Lecktor's help to figure out how the killer picks his
victims. Will teases Lecktor until Lecktor accepts
to look at the files in his prison cell.
Lecktor toys with Will's brain and manages to bring back Will's trauma so that Will runs out of the prison as if chased by a ghost.
Freddy is waiting outside and takes pictures of him, so that his newspaper's headlines read that Will visited Lecktor at the prison.
Lecktor asks for a phone to make a call to his lawyer, but then uses the paper of a chewing gum to hijack the phone line and call a psychiatrist who works with Will. Pretending to be a publisher who wants to send a review copy to Will, he obtains Will's home address.
We understand that Lecktor is not only dangerous but extremely smart.
Will visits another house where the killer struck. He approaches it like
an intruder. He finds a rope hanging from a tree branch and climbs it, and
guesses that the killer must have been sitting on that tree all day long
spying on the family.
Will calls Jack and tells him that he wants to find out
which cutting tool was used to cut the branches of the tree and wants to
find out the meaning of a mark that the killer left on the tree.
Jack mobilizes experts but right then he gets a phone call from the warden
of the prison that they found a note hidden inside a book in Lecktor's cell:
the note appears to be from the killer. The killer expresses his admiration
for Lecktor and mentions that he finds Will fascinating.
Will tells Jack to replace the note in
Lecktor's cell so that Lecktor will not know that they found it,
but first they analyze the note and discover instruction on how to communicate by posting personal messages in Freddy's newspaper.
Jack wants to intercept the next message and replace it with an invitation
to show up at a train station where cops will be waiting to make an arrest,
but first they have to figure out which code Lecktor and the killer are using.
A message from the killer posted in the newspaper has strange references like
"Galatians 15:2" (but Galatians in the Bible only has six chapters) and
"Jonah 6:8" (but Jonah only has four chapters), so clearly they are not
using the Bible to generate their code.
If Jack posts a message without the right code, the killer will know that
it's not coming from Lecktor.
Jack's team tries to find out which books Lecktor has access to, but there is no time: the newspaper is about to go to press. Will decides to print the
fake message anyway.
Will also offers himself as bait to catch the killer. We learn that his
retirement was caused by a trauma caused by the Lecktor case. His friend Sidney
discourages him from getting into another mess.
Will provokes the killer by giving Freddy the interview that Freddy desires,
except that Will dreams up everything, and it's a scathing profile of the
killer as a depraved, homosexual, impotent individual who even had sex with
his own mother.
Jack's team still can't decipher the code used by Lecktor and the killer, but
has found out that
the mark on the tree is a Chinese character that means "red dragon".
Will walks at night in a deserted street while snipers are ready to strike
if the killer attacks him.
A man runs towards him and Will grabs him, but he's just a jogger.
The real killer kidnaps Freddy instead.
Freddy wakes up blindfolded and tied to a wheelchair.
The killer, referring to himself as the "Red Dragon", blames Freddy for the disparaging article.
The killer forces Freddy to watch a slide show of his victims before and after killing them and the last slide is a picture of Freddy, implying that he's going to die.
The killer forces Freddy to read a statement that the article was all lies
and then sets him on fire.
Jack's team finally decodes Lecktor's message to the killer: it contains Will's home address and instructions to kill Will and his entire family.
The police wake up Jack's wife and child in the middle of the night, surrounding the home to protect them.
Molly and the child get relocated to a secret location.
Will tells his son Kevin what happened with Lecktor: Lecktor was killing
college girls, in order to catch him Will had to immerse in the mindset of
a serial killer, Lecktor attacked him in a brutal way but was captured,
Will ended up in a psychiatric hospital because he kept thinking like
a serial killer, the ugliest thoughts in the world.
It's six days from the next full moon, when presumably the killer will strike again.
The film shifts to a film laboratory, where a Francis works: he's the killer, as evidenced by the photograph he has of one of his victims, a married woman.
A blind co-worker, Reba, needs a ride home and Francis accepts to ride her.
As they leave the lab, he surprises her with a stop by a veterinarian room where
a tiger has been sedated on a surgical table
for dental treatment.
She is allowed to caress it and is fascinated by the heartbeat, and Francis is fascinanted by her fascination.
He takes her to dinner and then to his place, where he pretends he's watching
a movie when in reality he's watching a video of the married woman before
he killed her and her entire family.
Francis and Reba make love, with Reba more proactive than him. After sex, he sobs.
Back to Will, he hears from Jack that his team has identified
the tyre tracks left at the scene of Freddy's murder as belonging to a van.
Will also phones Lecktor, who psychoanalyzes him as a potential serial killer
but also reveals something about the mindset of a serial killer.
Will retraces the steps of the killer as he entered the house of the married woman.
Back to Francis, he spies on a date by Reba with another man. Francisc loses
control in his van. As the man is leaving the house, Francis shoots him dead.
He then walks into Reba's house and kidnaps her.
Back to Will, he thinks he understands the mindset of the killer:
he dreams about being desired, he uses mirrors, he doesn't take souvenirs but
must be taking other kinds of mementos (we already know he in fact takes
pictures and videos).
Jack is desperate because they found no connection between the two families that were slaughtered so far and it's almost midnight of the full-moon night: the killer is about to strike somewhere but they haven't figured out the logic nor who he is.
However, Will is so good at immersing in the killer's mindset that he guesses
that the killer knew everything about the two families he killed, which means that he saw the home videos made by the two families before he walked into their homes.
They have been looking all the time for similarities between the two killings and this is it: the killer saw both home videos of these two unrelated families.
He asks Jack to check the labels on the tapes: they show
that both videos were developed in the same laboratory, which we know is Francis' workplace.
While Jack and Will are flying towards the city of the laboratory, they talk with the
laboratory and try to find the employee who developed the films. They are
looking for a white man with blond hair who drives a van. And that's how they
pinpoint Francis. They land and head for Francis' residence, asking the local
police to meet them there.
Back to Francis, he's terrorizing Reba who cannot see him.
Francis breaks a mirror and grabs a big shard to kill Reba who cannot see what he is doing.
Will arrives just in time to see this and jumps through a window.
This saves Reba but Will is injured and falls to the ground unconscious.
Francis starts shooting at the cops.
Will recovers just in time to shoot Francis dead.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Mann also produced the TV series
Miami Vice (1984-89) and
Crime Story (1986-88).
Heat (1995), based on a true story, is a tense thriller that benefits from stellar acting even though it is overlong for the story it tells and the story is not always plausible.
A quintet of thieves carries out a spectacular heist in the streets of Los Angeles: Neil, the boss (Robert De Niro), Chris, Michael, driver Gilbert and newly hired Waingro. The latter is a psycho who pointlessly kills a guard, which causes the killing of two more guards. Neil is furious and later outside a restaurant tries to kill Waingro but he manages to escape.
Vincent (Al Pacino) is a police detective who neglects his wife. He has a stepdaughter from his wife's previous marriage, Lauren (Natalie Portman). Lauren is excited when her father is supposed to pick her up but her father always flakes out, causing her to be depressed. At the same time, Vincent's wife (his third) is unhappy because he is obsessed with catching criminals and doesn't find time for his family.
Neil gets his tips from his friend Nate (Jon Voight), who also fences the loot.
It was Nate who told Neil about a large sum in bonds to steal.
Nate wants to sell the bonds that Neil stole to the original owner, Roger Van Zant, who is a cynical and greedy money launderer.
Neil's favorite is Chris, who is having issues with his wife but loves her dearly.
Neil is a loner but one day he meets a pretty and sweet girl, Eady, who confesses that she feels lonely. They sleep together.
Nate arranges the deal with Van Zant but Van Zant tells his right-hand man that he wants to kill the thieves.
At the same time Nate offers Neil a new deal: robbing a bank.
Neil catches Chris' wife sleeping with another man and threatens her: Neil
treats Chris likea son.
Another story begins: a black man on parole finds employment in a restaurant but the owner is a scumbag who treats him like a slave and blackmails him. The ex convict has no choice. His girl, however, is proud of him.
Neil meets Van Zant's man to get the money for the bonds but it's a trap. Neil
realizes it in time and his men annihilate Van Zant's men. Neil then calls Van Zant and tells him that the deal is off and that he will die.
Vincent is determined to find the thieves who killed three guards. Vincent
visits an informat and obtains information linking the robbery to Gilbert.
The cops quickly identify all the members of the gang, except Waingro who went into hiding. We see that Waingro is a maniac who kills girls after having sex with them.
Vincent and his cops hide microphones in the homes of the gang members and then
prepare to arrest them when they break into a warehouse to steal precious metal,
but Neil senses that someone is watching them and calls off the heist.
Now that he knows that cops are watching them, Neil is nervous.
One day the gang meets to discuss the bank robbery. Vincent and his cops are
watching them but can't figure out why the gang met in such an odd place: between a scrapyard and a refinery. Then Vincent figures it out: the gang is watching them. In fact, Neil is on a roof taking pictures of Vincent. Later, Neil asks Nate to find out about Vincent.
The cops track down Neil's car and Vincent drives like a maniac to catch up with
him and pull him over. Neil hasn't done anything wrong so Vincent simply invites him to have a drink. Vincent respects Neil who has shown to be a very smart man.
Neil respects that Vincent is devoted to his job. Unfortunately they are enemies and swear to kill each other if necessary.
Meanwhile, Van Zant lives in fear, barricaded in his office.
Waingro comes to offer help: he knows how to betray Neil.
Neil, Michael and Chris meet at a restaurant on the way to the bank, but their driver Gilbert calls that he cannot make it. Neil notices the black ex convict in
the restaurant's kitchen and remembers him from prison days. Neil offers him
to take the place of the driver and the black man, fed with the restaurant owner,
accepts. They drive to the bank and begin the heist. Vincent, tipped by Van Zant, rushes to the bank in time to see the gang walk out with the loot. A shootout
follows: Michael and the black ex-convict get killed, Chris gets wounded, Neil
manages to walk away dragging Chris with him. Countless cops get killed (rather implausible).
Neil wants to kill the traitor Gilbert, but finds him lying on the floor, about to die after having been tortured by Waingro and Van Zant, and his wife lies dead in the other room. Gilbert begs Neil to finish him and Neil shoots him in the head.
Neil enters Van Zant's mansion and kills him.
Vincent's cops try a new way to get Neil: they convince Chris' wife to cooperate so that her baby won't grow up the son of two criminals in jail. She accepts but then, when Chris shows up, she gestures to him to get away.
Vincent learns that Waingro is hiding in a hotel and bets that Neil will find out, so he prepares a trap at the hotel.
Neil asks Eady to leave the country with him and she, who has found out that he's a wanted criminal, accepts (another implausible element of the plot).
Vincent walks home to find her wife in bed with a lover. They broke up.
Having failed to capture Chris and having no news of Neil, Vincent resigns
himself to have lost the case and drives home. He finds his stepdaughter in the bathtub: she slit her wrists. He takes her to the hospital and stays there with her mother, now his ex wife.
Nate arranges for Neil to leave the country on a private airplane and also gives him the tip where Waingro is hiding. Neil says that he's not interested in Waingro but only in starting a new life with Eady. However, halfway to the airport, with Eady in his car, Neil makes a U-turn and drives to the hotel, enters the hotel,
creates confusion by pulling the alarm, breaks into Waingro's room and shoots him. The cops are still watching the place and call Vincent.
While Eady sits in the car, Neil walks out of the hotel and Vincent arrives at the hotel. Seeing Vincent, Neil walks away, abandoning Eady. Throughout the movie Neil repeated the rule of thumb: don't get attached to anything that you cannot dump in 30 seconds in case of trouble.
It is night.
Neil runs on foot to the airport (another implausible element), chased by Vincent It becomes a duel in the dark. Neil hides, Vincent searches for him.
Eventually they face each other and Vincent is faster: Neil dies.
The Insider (1999)
Ali (2001)
Collateral (2004)
Miami Vice (2006)
Public Enemies (2009)
Blackhat (2015)
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