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‘I Probably Shouldn’t Even Be Answering This Question’
Michael Mann on why American critics dismissed Thief, and what’s going on with Heat 2.
Frank effectively quotes Karl Marx’s labor theory of value when he tells Leo (Robert Prosky), the alternately avuncular and demonic Outfit boss who seeks to control him, “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.” When I interviewed him in 2023, Mann noted that he saw that line pop up on pickets during that year’s WGA-SAG strike. Watching Thief, yes, we’re naturally mesmerized by its nocturnal compositions, its lovely sense of melancholy, its almost abstract robbery sequences filled with sparks and flames bursting off steel vaults. And we see Frank’s work, his risk, his sweat: The film spends an unusual amount of screen time portraying how he and his partners prepare for their scores, gathering and building the right equipment, evading alarm systems and police; then it spends even more time showing the jobs themselves, as these men lug giant pieces of equipment (all real tools used by the professional thieves Mann hired as consultants on the film) into bank vaults and exhaust themselves drilling holes in safes.
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