These modern gods seek speed as a state of living through which to attain freedom, and in their rush they sometimes touch the world. So we must take these figures as icons, as gods, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger, aglow with historic cache, being the most emblematic, but Hathaway a robust and risky attempt at a sui generis, truly of-the-moment figure of might and awe. Only the kind of self-aware “acting” found in the cinematic professionals of Howard Hawks’s adventurers offers a solution to this problem, but Mann is far too serious for such deceptively casual playfulness in his actors. That film's feeling of lifestyle aspiration is a nuance which enriches its dynamics at the cost of the same scoffing implausibility Hathaway’s hunky couture styling also never quite overcomes: attitude taken to such decadent heights they are hard to reconcile with the rest of the pictures. This abstract rawness befits the fugitives of Public Enemies (2009) and Blackhat better than the cop-chic heroes of Miami Vice, who seem to aspire to the rough and tumble lifestyle of the outlaw. This has been taken much further with Mann's latest digital works, where a film like Blackhat features a rawer, more fleet, ungainly and sensual world than its celluloid predecessors. Even before the director moved to digital video and summarily increased the degree of abstraction in both his images and his mise en scène, Mann has used a kind of clinical expressionism to clothe his hyper-masculinized heroes in an aura of glamorous, brooding destabilization and negative space.
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