The Last of the Mohicans Review

Almost nobody speaks during the closing chase. Michael Mann stages three pursuits along a cliff path above a river, cuts them to a looping string figure, and lets footsteps and a raised tomahawk carry the meaning. It is one of the best sustained action sequences of the decade, and it exposes how thin some of the two hours before it are.

Dante Spinotti shoots the Blue Ridge forests in available light with powder smoke hanging in the trees, and Mann's insistence on real muskets and their slow reload gives the skirmishes a weight that imitators never found. Wes Studi's Magua is the performance that holds the picture together, patient and wounded and perfectly reasonable by his own account.

Day-Lewis runs, reloads and speaks with a flat frontier plainness that suits the part, though the part is mostly physical. The romance with Madeleine Stowe's Cora is asserted rather than dramatized, two or three charged glances standing in for a reason, and Steven Waddington's Heyward stays wooden until the script needs him for a sacrifice. The middle stretch, between the fall of the fort and the cliffs, is choppy enough that Mann has recut the film more than once without fixing it.