Mann Hunter

Manhunter is a classy, top-notch thriller, an early entry into the sick-but-brilliant serial killer genre whose influence can still be seen in Hollywood’s now-required yearly output of movies about crafty sickos teasing cops. The movie’s legacy is dubious: It was one of, if not the first, film to shift the public image of serial killers from deranged psychotics to grandly towering mental giants—after Manhunter big screen serial murderers morphed from bloodthirsty gutter dwellers to flawed gods. Now every b-film director with pretensions of intelligence has to take a stab at the genre, and its cut-rate progeny can be found on the thriller racks of video stores everywhere.

Looking at Michael Mann’s movie in comparison with Brett Ratner’s slicker, dimmer, more conventional sibling, Red Dragon, is like watching a film school exercise on a studio production budget. Two directors adapting the same material make drastically different films, and both products are acutely in tune with their creator's sensibility (or lack thereof). Ratner’s Red Dragon is a serviceable, if utterly unimpressive, bit of studio fluff. It turns the Tooth Fairy into a raving monster, a tattooed freak—like a comic book villain—focuses far more on gore and easy shocks, and looks pretty much like every other glossy $60 million star picture to hit multiplex screens in the last 15 years.

Mann’s film, on the other hand, is slower, more thoughtful, the product of an individual rather than the Hollywood machine. It bears all his trademarks. There’s the hounded cop struggling to contain the brutalities of his day job without jeopardizing his home life. There’s the driving pop soundtrack. There’s the fascination with modernist architecture and the deep, chilly blue sheen of the photography. There’s the monomaniacal villain: penetrating, intense, yet subdued, occasionally even wounded. Manhunter is a Mann film all the way to its chilly, blue-lit core. Looks like Sarris was right.