Just to be clear, Michael Mann’s Collateral is a thriller, and an adept one at that. I say this up-front because that part of the movie isn’t of much interest to me. It doesn’t seem to captivate Mann, either. What Mann recognizes better than other directors is that investment in characters makes the action more tense and suspenseful. (Also, David Mamet’s Spartan.)
The youthful, idealistic energy of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men has been replaced by the grim realities of corporate journalism in writer/director Michael Mann’s The Insider. While the inexperienced Washington Post reporters put their own lives in danger pursuing a scandal that reached to the highest levels of political power, 60 Minutes disembowels a story that could bring the tobacco industry to its knees. The surprise is that Mann’s movie ends up being more of a human story – a touching, potent portrait of a man who did the right thing for the wrong reasons with a phenomenal performance at its center.
