Daniel Day-Lewis is not what you would call an action star, but he’s the kind of actor with a compassionate edge and a sense of intensity that makes him ideal for the role of Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans.”
“I ain’t your scout. And I ain’t in your damn militia,” Day-Lewis says with a glower, a fine example of how Mann gets him to wear this man-of-action face.
He truly helps make “The Last of the Mohicans” feel iconic, watching him sprint through a battlefield or leap through a darkened waterfall in slow motion, his hair flowing behind him.
It’s a treat, as this is a rare film today to have flesh and blood battles of this scale and scope. Mann relishes in the opportunity not just to blow stuff up but to watch how smoke billows through the frame from these unique cannon and mortar blasts. He puts hundreds in the spotlight at once, just marveling in wide vista shots and cutting swiftly from just about every angle.
His style is not quite minimalist, yet modern action movies have moved away from his steadied hand and level of clarity to something more abrasive and “docu-realistic.” Today the Mohawk ambush near the tail end of “The Last of the Mohicans” looks more like “Spartacus” than it does “The Lord of the Rings.” One would hope that for his next film he could combine the best aesthetic aspects of this and “Public Enemies,” a film ahead of its time in its digital cinematography, to create something on a grand scale that could humiliate the CGI epics of the day.
On a narrative level, there’s not much to write home about. The chemistry and romance between Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe is more simplistic than the two-people-from-other-worlds narrative it’s suggesting. The history too seems sanitized as though it was more interested in recreating period detail than in exploring the black mark on American history in eradicating a tribe like the Mohicans. Hawkeye and his two travel companions feel like lost warriors in the spirit of an old samurai movie and less like complex figures of Americana.
What “The Last of the Mohicans” is is an action movie, and it’s an at times stunning one. I can’t think of what Mann does that could be called innovative, but he strings together these action sequences so well and in a way that few are still doing today.