You don’t need to do much to sell most of Michael Mann‘s movies. In Heat, he pits a crew of skilled bank robbers against an obsessed, equally formidable police detective. In Collateral, an unassuming cab driver ends up the hostage of a hit man with a list of people he needs to kill in one night. These films sell themselves. They are based around obviously exciting concepts, directed with reliably eye-catching style, and — more often than not — feature recognizable movie stars. Mann has, in other words, spent most…
