The Man (2005)

The Man, directed by Les Mayfield, stars Samuel L. Jackson as ATF agent Derrick Vann and Eugene Levy as Andy Fiddler, a dental supply salesman mistaken for a gun trafficker. The plot involves Detroit, stolen ATF weapons, mistaken identity, forced partnership, a sting, and repeated jokes about bullets in buttocks. The film arrived with modest ambitions and left with a 12 percent approval rating. It is a buddy cop comedy that treats its Black lead and integrated supporting cast as ordinary facts of casting. No speeches about race, no historical reckoning, no identity thesis. Anthony Mackie appears as an informant; Rachael Crawford as an ex-wife; Philip Akin as an internal affairs agent. The film never pauses to explain them. That absence is itself the finding.

A female lieutenant, played by Susie Essman, exists as a boss, but her authority is plot furniture. The ex-wife reminds Vann about a dance recital, a domestic obligation, not a feminist argument. Villainy is an illegal arms ring, which the film treats as crime, not as a symptom of late capitalism. No LGBTQ themes, no climate concerns, no body positivity, no neurodivergent coding. Levy's chatter is comic irritation, not a diagnosis. The film has no interest in revising history or lecturing anyone. Its moral universe extends to clearing Vann's name, saving a child's recital, and avoiding a cavity search. Any progressive content is accidental and faint.

As a cultural document, The Man is nearly empty of the modern markers. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a car chase. The casting of Jackson and a multiracial supporting roster is notable only if we expect 2005 studio comedies to be monochrome, which they were not. The movie's failures are aesthetic and commercial, not ideological. It wants to be an odd-couple action comedy and succeeds only at being loud. We score it accordingly: a low reading, with a small allowance for the simple presence of a Black lead and a female authority figure. Otherwise, it is a time capsule of preachy-free studio product, which is its own kind of honesty. It does not pretend to improve us. It just asks us to watch Eugene Levy talk too much. There are worse sins. There are also better movies.