Outlaw Sublime

Call it the outlaw sublime—a style that channels the tradition of the American tough guy and re-aestheticizes the hardboiled existentialism of the 1930s and ’40s for the postmodern era. Mann’s romanticism may be retro, but he and his characters move through an ultramodern world of networked security systems, ubiquitous surveillance and globalized capital. There’s a continuity to his historical epics and sleek crime pictures. Whether set among the tangled freeways and glass towers of Chicago, L.A. or Miami; the pre-Revolutionary wilderness; or the hardscrabble streets of Depression-era America, Mann channels the same visual grandeur and parses the same logic of honor.