An ambitious, even overambitious, game of cops and robbers, fitted by rolling pin into the time-frame of Monday Night Football, a shade under three hours. Writer-director Michael Mann wants to have his opposing game players two opposite ways — as existential archetypes and as multi-dimensional humans — and the transitions back and forth tend to be a bit neck-wrenching. Too, there's more plot than Mann can handle, with many missing links in the detective work and elsewhere, and some soppy relationship stuff in the interests of fleshing out the characters and stretching out the length. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — together at last! — do manage to bridge the generational gap that separated them in The Godfather, Part II, but only for one philosophical tête-à-tête, cop to robber, over coffee, prior to their tremendously tense climactic showdown on the desolate outskirts of LAX. (Ingenious use of the runway lights coming on and going off.) The action scenes without exception are rattlingly effective, despite an uncertain grasp of the concepts of space and distance. And the intervening scenes are kept interesting, not by any intricacy of plot or character, but by a deep bench of solid supporting players including Diane Venora (with her Keely Smith haircut), Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight (slimeball supreme), Tom Sizemore, Ted Levine, Wes Studi, and Dennis Haysbert. Of the very large cast, Pacino is the only member who ignores the less-is-more instruction under which everybody else obediently labors. He's the untrustworthy soul who sees that the movie is his for the taking. And he's the cop! (1995) — Duncan Shepherd