Stoic loners, secret lifestyles, blurred moral lines, and slick action; these are the things that Michael Mann films are made of. Mann’s recurring proclivities as director have allowed him to endure and flourish in his storied career, measured in decades and peppered with stories as different as they are alike. If you can track similar motifs and ideas from one Mann film to the next, you cannot accuse him of just making the same movie from one production to the next. Having a niche isn’t the same thing as being a creatively lazy cheapskate.
But what if Mann nudged himself out of that niche and tried tackling unfamiliar milieus? What would it look like if Mann lowered his standards and remade a few movies like all the cool kids in Hollywood do? He’s already made movies based on the creative output of Thomas Harris and Anthony Yerkovich, so repackaging films both new and old, great and abominable, doesn’t seem like a huge stretch for him, and who’s to say that the works of Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater couldn’t stand a little Manning up? Thus, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, we introduce our list of five movies we’d like to see Michael Mann remake, starting with…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Would it really be all that strange if Michael Mann made a superhero flick? Christopher Nolan used Mann’s heist blueprint as his structural reference point for The Dark Knight, after all, so Mann’s style has already been appropriated for comic book fare. Putting him at the helm just makes sense, and hey, someone’s going to re-reboot Spider-Man’s origin schtick for the big screen soon enough anyways. In The Amazing Spider-Mann, Peter Parker would balance his grief over the death of Uncle Ben (played, ideally, by William Petersen) against his relationships with Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborn; they’re testy, to say the least, and Peter’s too naive to spot the heat coming around the corner, so Gwen bites it. (Again.) After going mano a mano and leveling entire New York City blocks, Harry takes a fatal wound – pumpkin bomb shrapnel, natch – and Peter holds his dying friend’s hand before JFK’s bustling runway.
The Royal Tenenbaums
Royal Tenenbaum is a total cad, a liar, a cheat, and a bon vivant; he’s one of the best worst dads in movie history, one felony shy of earning a position in Mann’s stable of flawed human beings. Mann might not be keen on Anderson’s preciously curated cinema, but he’d be pretty big on Royal’s moral imperfection. He wouldn’t have to change much about The Royal Tenenbaums, then, save for a career shift for Royal, who in Mann’s version divorces his wife (and by extension his family) to safeguard them from the collateral dangers of his career as an undercover cop. He tries to reconnect with them all in the shadow of an ongoing investigation involving a drug cartel (led by Owen Wilson) and the Aryan Brotherhood. (He could even keep the original film’s climax, with Royal saving his grandsons from a coked-out Wilson’s vehicular rampage. Seems like a slam dunk.)
Before Sunset
How well do you really know your star-crossed lover? Nine years after first meeting in Vienna and becoming enamored of one another, Jesse’s and Celine’s paths cross yet again when he takes a trip to Paris to promote the book he wrote to commemorate their evening of talky romance together. Celine offers to tour him through the City of Light’s cobblestone streets before he jets back Stateside to rejoin his unstable family life with his wife and son. But Celine, living a double life as a contract killer, has an ulterior motive on their seemingly innocuous stroll; block by block, she quietly and surreptitiously knocks off the targets on her hit list. Jesse is at first horrified by her profession, but he’s so overwhelmingly charmed by her unrelenting Frenchness that he falls in love with her all over again.
Bicycle Thieves
In which post-war neorealism meets cool stylization. De Sica’s masterpiece doesn’t jibe with Mann’s bent as a filmmaker by any metric; it’s a naked, street-level presentation of a city that’s been rocked by conflict, and it’s about an honest man striving to make a better life for his family. But at the same time, Bicycle Thieves feels sort of like a gimme for Mann, who might find plenty of appeal in how well-intentioned people can and are shaped for the worse by an ill-intentioned world. In Mann’s film, Antonio Ricci might be an environmentally conscious veteran burglar who, obsessed with the American dream and desperate to provide for his wife and kids, makes the professional blunder of accepting one last job from an unscrupulous crime boss. Antonio’s ambitions degrade his professional caution, and his trust bike is stolen from him, putting both the caper and his dreams in jeopardy.
Singin’ in the Rain
There’s a relevant nugget at the core of Singin’ in the Rain that Mann could latch onto from a creative perspective, and as a creative type. As the story of Don Lockwood and Monumental Pictures portrays the slow, often painful period of transition from silent films to talkies, so too does Mann’s work in the aughts reflect modern Hollywood’s crossover from film to digital. Mann, of course, has evolved of his own volition, and the shift from the look of films like Thief and Heat to the digital sheen of Collateral and Miami Vice represents a gulf in his work as an auteur. So maybe Singin’ in the Rain would just be a Michael Mann joint about, well, Michael Mann’s contributions to modern cinema as a digital pioneer, which builds to a head when he does his best Gene Kelly impression and begins frolicking through water-slicked streets proclaiming his unabashed joy.
