My rule of thumb is simple. Directors who make movies I love are awesome. Directors who make movies I hate are crap.
Which makes Michael Mann horribly difficult. To wit:
Public Enemies (Boring, characters unlikeable [How do you make Johnny Depp unlikeable!?!])Mann has ONE film I love without qualification. One. Normally, that relegates him to the crap category with an even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day caveat.
Miami Vice (Like, but only ironically; if Colin Farrel and Jamie Foxx weren't reinventing Don Johnson and Phil Michael Thomas' Crockett and Tubbs I wouldn't care)
Collateral (LOVE)
Ali (Hate, too long)
The Insider (Boring, predictable)
Heat (Hate, good action, awful dialogue, relies too much on Deniro and Pacino as icons, also too long)
The Last of the Mohicans (Like, saved by the soundtrack and DDL)
Manhunter (LOVE, saved by Peterson and Cox)
The Keep (Haven't seen)
Thief (Haven't seen, music by Tangerine Dream)
But.
He does Collateral so well. Shots are sparse, dark, and absolutely capture Los Angeles in a Blade Runner-esque dystopian vision using only location and natural lighting. Music perfectly suits every scene (I especially love the night club shootout). Colors are somehow muted while still conveying LA's neon gilt.
Granting a smidgen of hyperbole here, I would venture to say he's technically flawless in every single one of his movies.
And yet they all suck.
Mann has two irritating habits qua director: (1) Inability to kill darlings, and (2) Mind-boggling screenplay choice. Collateral is tight for a Mann film, clocking in at 2 hours. Did Ali, Insider, and Heat all really need to be 160+ minutes? Did we really need each one of those scenes exposing the characters to be...exactly what we already knew them to be? And the writing in Collateral is superb; it's hard to believe Mann liked the script. There's a serious clash of worldviews, existential angst, excurses about music (which always point back to the main ideological clash), a sympathetic main character and a charming villain (how novel!). In Collateral, Mann's technique serves a fantastic story. Most of his films feature an orgy of detail, technique for the sake of technique, and feel like a love letter to film-making rather than a conscious effort to entertain.
I am simply at a loss.
And for the record, every time David Fincher makes another movie, I feel him slipping into the Mann zone.