If style in some pure and classical ideal is grace calling no attention to itself, Michael Mann is pure modern refutation: a complete show-off. Every shot reinforces its effort, its malleability, its dripping, refurbished beauty. Close-ups bore into the face, then suddenly, after a quick cut, enormous vistas of space open up. The DV camera wanders, catching details of watches on wrists and the telling twitch of an eye (and a dozen other smaller details) like a fussy Updikean realist composing a picture, then doubles back to catch planes, boats, whole streets, a whole world. What do you call this? Particular generalism? Hyperactive slowness?

How about Michael Mann.

Then there's the grain and drunken blur of colours that make up the film's palate — the blues and purples, sea green, night as pixels and nothing more. The style is ludicrously overwrought, but it's undeniable. Mann frames Farrell and Foxx against the night sky, chopping their legs out of the frame, and all of a sudden they're floating. Farrell goes to simply return a shotgun to the boot of his car, and Mann's camera captures a saturated night sky throwing off purple thunder, the scene dense with rot — it's any other film's epiphany thrown into the background of the simplest action.

This style is utterly immersive, and demands an equal awareness from the viewer — you either accept it in all its overwrought fussy glory, or you write it off as preposterous. While most aesthetic crushes tend to bring out in the adorer a defensiveness bordering on the hideously sensitive, in this case I completely sympathise with Mann's detractors. But this isn't a high stakes game, as with the truly crucial critical stand-offs. Rather, this is about an attitude towards the half-there, the difficult, the trashily ridiculous. It's about an attitude towards what I've casually estimated to be about 87% of all the world's vain creation (art, mostly popular). So it's kind of important, in it's own wacky way.

When Mann applies this style to action, it's potent — the jittery, close-and-far-away style energises a simple walk to the car, and delivers action scenes to you in a fashion that's like a distracted, hypnotised Paul Greengrass — all of the Bourne film's hyperenergy, yet abstracted and poeticised, catching the flight of a bird in the middle of a gunfight. Yet this same style applied to love scenes often yields embarrassing results — Mann can't help lingering on the backs of his lovers, strands of hair wet on the back, etc. Even with that restless eye, it feels hackneyed, familiar — the old 80s sex montage of hands on an arched back, of barely suppressed orgasmic tingles.

It's often an utterly ludicrous film, particularly as most of the dialogue, reduced to the spare utterance of threat and desire, goes into some new freaky realm of hardboiled purity. It's not enough to say visually confident directors like Mann often don't feel the need for a whole lot of exposition and chit-chat — it's like the film's got some sort of grudge against everyday talk. Crockett and Tubbs don't communicate — they pose short, hard questions, and look for either a nod or a shake of the head. Some of this stuff can result in genuine unintended humour, and might not survive typing ("Let's take it to the limit" indeed).

There's one other curious weakness in the film — music. The love scenes are scored with horrendous soft rock — for someone who at this point in his career is an American Antonioni, his taste in tunes is up their with a MMM programmer. One emotional highpoint of the film is scored, of all things, by Audioslave. Not all artist's senses are equal, but this is ridiculous.

Still, what I remembered from my first quasi-disappointed cinema viewing, and what comes back to me in the snippets of the film floating around the schizoid holding house of cable television, is indelible, and can be summarised, described, or evoked in two simple shots: the opener — the purest example of in media res in recent cinema history, Crocket and Tubbs already well into their lives, and the night's task already swallowing them; and that final shot — as definitive a closer as an old fashioned 40s Warner Brothers 'THE END' title coming at you, yet elusive, as open to an imaginary film unspooling in your head as you leave the cinema, as anything I can remember (and never forget).