Word: copping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...only thing worse than the view from the window is being seated next to someone who hasn't taken the flight before. During one especially difficult landing in 2004, a retired American cop wouldn't stop screaming "Oh, God! Oh, God!" I finally had to slap him on the face--on instructions from the flight attendant. Another time the man in the window seat was a muscular, heavily tattooed Polynesian ex-commando who spent an hour telling me of his life as a mercenary in a succession of South Pacific island nations--stories that often ended with his punching, stabbing...
...Mann's name isn't on He Walked by Night, a film that had a lot to do with restoring his reputation. Alfred Werker directed most of this exemplary procedural, in which L.A. cops track a clever thief (Richard Basehart) who robs electronics stores to get the parts for state-of-the-art radios, and who eventually kills a cop and is tracked into the city sewers. But "Mann's contribution was considerable," the Basinger book tells us. "It seems that he did the location filming with Richard Basehart, the final sequence of his flight through the sewers, the night...
...must be said, however, that Mann the writer is perhaps a little too taken with detail. Basically, his undercover-cop duo (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) are pretending to be high-level, freelance drug smugglers making a deal with a Hispanic cartel that does not think small, and in the first part of his film Mann dawdles them through a labyrinth that's not conventionally menacing. Foxx and Farrell don't have a lot to do in those passages, which permits us to spend plenty of time with Li, who plays the criminal gang's enigmatic financial whiz, and that...
There's nothing mysterious about Harris, playing Foxx's cop lover. She's brave and tough minded, and her fate is what finally energizes the movie's concluding chapter. Mann is good at action, especially when it comes to surprises--the sudden blossoming of blood behind a gunned-down bad guy, the mighty explosion that we aren't expecting...
...think of Hammer as a cop without a badge. Think of him as a discharged, displaced soldier, perhaps with a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. As the Mick said about the men who came home from World War II, "They knew what a person's mind could do to him." Hammer's belligerence might seem neolithic to civilians, but to young men who had survived the horror of war, and knew many who didn't, his advance-guard wariness on New York's mean streets was nothing less than a life skill...