I have watched this film over and over. It’s a fantastic piece of cinema but not perhaps for the reasons you expect. The director Michael Mann took his 1989 film “L.A. Takedown” and re-made it with two of the world’s greatest actors. Let me being with what this film is NOT. It is not a gangster film, it doesn’t feature particularly memorable dialogue and doesn’t feature the best performances of DeNiro or Pacino (although they are very good as usual). All the performances are good (including Val Kilmer). It’s the tale of two obsessed perfectionists with DeNiro as a deadly cool thief and Pacino as a workaholic cop with serious relationship problems. The plot is perfectly satisfactory but it is in the direction, visuals and music that the film excels. It is visually very cool (despite the title) with lots of blue shades, cool suits and minimalist apartments. The pitched battle with heavy automatic weapons on the streets of L.A. is fantastic (and deafening) and ironically inspired a real life robbery (which ended very differently). Mann does an excellent job of getting L.A. to mirror the emotional wasteland of the central characters. The music is absolutely exceptional and does a fantastic job of creating mood. Criticisms? The first on screen meeting of DeNiro and Pacino (in a coffee shop) is not the exceptional moment we expect it to be. The use of blue screen is a little to obvious in DeNiro’s love scenes. At times Pacino’s lines are a little too poetic for his character and his performance feels like a re-hash of Scarface at times (like when he is threatening an informant). But these are minor criticisms in what is an absolutely exceptional piece of film making.
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