Heat is stone cold bad.

Rating: 4/10 (27 November 2009)

What passes for epic cinema these days can be found in Heat, a noisy, bombastic, self reverential cops and robbers bore that between gun battles drags for most of it's three hour (yes three) running time.
Detective Vin Hanna (Al Pacino) is a standout cop with almost as many bad marriages as commendations. Neil MacCauley (Robert DiNero) is a career criminal always bent on the big score. Both men are very methodical and take great pride in their professionalism. After botching a brinks job Hanna pursues the gang which is beginning to fray at the edges. Mac Cauley realizes it's tough to get good help these days and decides on one last score before calling it quits.
Showcasing the biggest meeting since Truman met Stalin at Potsdam director Michael Mann treats the first meeting of Pacino and DiNero together (both were in Godfather 2 but appeared in no scenes together) with the same solemnity as the two actors wheeze through their moment. With nothing new or revelatory to say, they show manly respect and understanding for each other. The problem is the scene is more about these closely identified highly regarded actors than the characters they play. Their star wattage (as well as their skills) may have dimmed by 95 but their legendary status carried a lot of weight. It's about as interesting as two old codgers reminiscing on an old folks home porch and rings hollow like the rest of this lumbering elephant of a film.
The convoluted plot is filled with forgettable characters but it does allow Mann to wander around LA spreading gratuitous violence. The women in the film are relegated to looking tired and concerned over their boy friends, acting as sounding boards for the guys to spew their Mannly philosophy about honor and being true to your skills.
The action scenes are big, loud, bloody, poorly edited and ridiculous as LA empties out to let the boys shoot it out in grand fashion on the streets. The badly paced montage of Al and Bobby dashing up and down the avenues with some very big weapons (size is everything to Mann)playing cops and robbers runs out of steam before they run out of bullets.
By the time they made Heat Pacino and DiNero had peaked before doing self parody (though Pacino would go on to give a stellar performance worthy of his early years as Roy Cohn in Angels in America) and it shows in their lackluster tired performances magnified even further by the film stealing effort turned in by Val Kilmer as gang member Chris. Kilmer's energy and the self confident way he moves and acts delivers the passion the two stars lack.
As in some of his other films Mann explores the theme of moral relativism with usual heavy handed pretension attempting to bestow nobility on the good as well as the bad, solemnizing the whole ponderous affair with Elliot Goldenthal's vapid score that is more appropriate for a coronation than a shoot'em up.
In Heat MacCauley states "Never have anything in your life that you can't walk out of in thirty seconds flat". One should keep this in mind before watching this big helium balloon of hot air.