Michael Mann is someone who knows how to make a film, I mean really knows. Even when I don’t particularly like the film (Manhunter and Miami Vice being examples) I still can’t deny the sheer technical know-how that Mann possesses. The Insider just adds to the list of his films that are clearly batting at level above a lot of others; this is a riveting and utterly captivating motion picture.

A recently fired research developer (Russell Crowe) for one of the biggest tobacco companies in America comes under great personal and professional attack when he decides to violate his contracts with the company by disclosing information to the press in an interview for 60 Minutes.

In true Michael Mann style this is a sprawling film in the way that it deals with so many different elements pertaining to one central set of events. Much like Mann’s crime saga masterpiece Heat, there is a paranoiac vein running through the whole thing. You feel, even when it’s something as simple as someone walking through a hotel lobby, that anyone and everyone around may have a hidden agenda. This is key to why the film works as well as it does; you really get put into this mindset of Crowe’s character, constantly wondering where and when the next problem is going to arise.

The film has a central idea that I think we can all relate to and root for — it’s the small guy going up against the big one. “Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure,” Al Pacino’s determined journalist replies to a wondering Christopher Plummer. This is one of the themes at the heart of The Insider, an inclusion that we would probably not see if the project was in the hands of another director. It’s always great to see such care and attention go into a film, especially of this type; metaphors and true-to-life themes abound here.

The events that are depicted in The Insider are true in a basic sense but since this is a drama there is a great deal that has been fictionalised for intended effect. Nonetheless, I just was taken in by everything that the film presented and for me it all easily could have been 100% true. The film presents itself in such a realistic way that any fictionalising isn’t at all easy to notice.

Since Mann brings together two of the acting profession’s best, there was clearly a task put in front of him to put them to good use. And Mann is very much successful in that endeavour. The film plays out in what is effectively two halves; the first sees Crowe’s information-holding researcher and how the twisting of his arm to spill the beans affects him both personally, with his wife and kids, and professionally (and it’s no surprise that the two affect each other greatly). In this first segment Pacino’s journalist Lowell Bergman is clearly a supporting character. This is where the film draws it’s most emotionally affecting scenes from, one being where Crowe’s character has to move out of their big house and how this hurts his family, particularly his wife, because of the happy times they’ve shared there.