The Last of the Mohicans

I saw Villeneuve's Dune yesterday and the majestic shots left me cold and emotionally detached, so I put on The Last of the Mohicans after a long time and my heart suddenly rejoices – this is how you make a film that lets its amazing visuals tell the story of its heroes without forgetting the touching, almost Shakespearean tale. Thanks mainly to the iconic music and Mann's dynamic direction, it's a goosebump-inducing ride from the start. And the final half-hour is a blast that brings me to my knees every time. Magua is an incredible and thoroughbred motherfucker, you don't see many bad guys like that anymore. 90 % (10/22/2021)

The Last of the Mohicans goes against established customs of adventure films, whether it concerns the development of the plot or its culmination. Of course, I won't reveal it, but when it comes to the character development and the story, it does not alternate, as is usually customary, between purely thrilling and action-packed sequences and the slow ones. Instead, it carefully adds depth to its characters for almost an hour and a half, subtly sowing the seeds of omnipresent tension, only to unleash all the fate, romance, and action in a straightforward and brilliantly executed final section. Cooper's adaptation is by no means perfect, but, in the end, Mann might deserve some award because it is mainly thanks to him that most viewers feel like they just watched a flawless film. If there is something perfect in this movie, it is definitely the soundtrack, one of the best music compositions in history. (08/01/2006)

Mann is a directorial intellectual with a unique gift for entertaining the masses. Reason and the senses can only wonder at the image and music composition, and the ingenious skill in building subtle relationships between the characters breathes life into the film. However, The Last of the Mohicans is, with all due respect, just a perfectly dressed Indian woman who, thanks to her simple shallowness, gave me the impression of perfect sterility the entire time. Any unwinding of the threads of the audience’s empathy for fated love crumbles from the warfare and vice versa. When it was over, I had a feeling of half-satisfied libido and longed for at least an extra half hour. PS: Having a familiar central theme doesn't automatically make the whole soundtrack brilliant. (10/05/2007)

The second strongest, most honest and soulful historical romance after Braveheart. The music is absolutely brilliant, with a central motif that is used in every other trailer. Madeleine Stowe is fantastic, not so much with her acting, but with her facial expressions. Daniel Day Lewis is a great actor and watching him in one of his best roles is an experience. Michael Mann brilliantly combines a strong romantic storyline with the bloody clash between two powers of the time, in a whole that is smooth, compact, and cohesive. Dante Spinotti's cinematography is superb and Mann's aggressive and mature direction was clearly the right choice for this story. (05/29/2004)

So that's where that music comes from! The Last of the Mohicans doesn't deny its age-old premise, especially in the romantic storyline. Almost every scene sweats pathos until it flows off the screen, and if by chance someone doesn't feel that way, the soundtrack pushes it in your face every five minutes until it's just funny. But once again you can rely on Mann, his perfectionism making some scenes breathtaking spectacle, further aided by the knowledge that this is the kind of "honest filmmaking (TM)" that involves hundreds of extras in real sets and everyone knows what to do (unlike Braveheart, where if you look beyond the foreground in the battles, there are some gentlemen jokingly wielding their swords and looking like boys playing knights). The convoy ambush scene is incredible. The Hurons running out of the woods on either side of the road, the initial confusion among the soldiers, then the first gunshots enveloping the entire clearing in white smoke, all in one slow rising shot where it's obvious that even the biggest newbie of a stuntman has been individually briefed on what he's supposed to be doing in the scene. Rarrr! (07/26/2018)