Given his age, any new films we get from Michael Mann are a gift, but I genuinely enjoyed this and I wanted to rewatch it immediately. Fran Hoepfner has talked about Mann’s films existing on an operatic/vibes continuum, and it’s not hard to guess which pole this one skews towards—it has a literal opera scene in it! Mann operating in top gear [ducks], truly.
Questionable accent choices aside the cast is doing good work here. Driver/Cruz are excellent—I loved Driver’s “Okey!” tic that he uses to reset his character, and I appreciated how calibrated Cruz was—you expect her to go big at a crucial moment late in the film, but instead she underplays things in a way that’s truly heartbreaking. (She goes bigger and broader in earlier scenes to much comedic effect). I don’t buy Woodley in this time period/setting but tbh her performance wasn’t the car wreck [dodges tomato] that many have been making it out to be.
I was surprised at how funny it was—and you really need that humor to counterbalance the grief and doom that weigh over the movie. Lots of gasps in the audience when the inevitable disasters strike. “Our deadly passion, our terrible joy,” indeed.