Decent effort by Mann, but frankly not nearly one of his best!

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 2012)

HEAT (1995), while an ambitious, competent offering in the Michael Mann collection of films, I frankly feel like it's very overrated. A daring undertaking by Mann, an epic crime drama clocking in at over 2.5 hours, populated by a large and diverse cast, it is a by-the-numbers tale of police procedure and high-level criminals, and starring acting legends Al Pacino (as robbery-homicide Lt Vincent Hanna) and Robert DeNiro (as master thief Neil MacCauley).
Frankly, I kind of think that this is one of Pacino's weaker acting efforts. And around this time (mid 90s) he was nailing every role in sight, just coming off of winning the Best Actor Oscar in 1992 for Scent of a Woman, giving one of his best performances in 1993 for Carlito's Way, for which he SHOULD HAVE been nominated Best Actor, and delivering a magnetic performance in 1994 for The Devil's Advocate. But Pacino seems very bored here, like he can't get a handle on this role of Hanna. Maybe it's because he was drained by this point. Pacino's dialog alternates between choppy monotone sentences and annoying rants that I feel detract from the film. While I don't think that his performance is all that great either, DeNiro really doesn't fare much better in his low-key role of criminal MacCauley, underplaying it to the extreme, perhaps attributable to the fact that his character has to display a lack of emotion because he can't establish connections and his level of maturity in relation to his younger cohorts. So Pacino overacts and DeNiro underacts...2 huge negatives for this film!
Ironically, while Pacino as the lead cop kind of mails it in, I was very impressed with the work of the actors on his team of cops played by Wes Studi, Mykelti Williamson, and Ted Levine, who sublimely essayed the roles of dedicated, overworked robbery-homicide detectives. Interestingly, I have the opposite feeling about DeNiro's criminal team. I thought the actors playing his team (Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Danny Trejo) were kind of lifeless, actually underplaying their roles even more then DeNiro did. Most of the female characters are a aren't very good either, all pretty indistinguishable, other than the standard Hollywood trick of making each one a little different: Diane Venora (as Pacino's wife) plays the worrisome cop wife, Ashley Judd (as Kilmer's wife) plays the bitchy criminal's wife, and Amy Brenneman (as DeNiro's flame) plays the innocent young oblivious girlfriend. They were all much too mannered in their performances, just surface roles. Interesetingly, the best female performance came from the (then) teen-aged Natalie Portman, who really showed some early acting chops as Pacino's troubled stepdaughter. Portman really outshined many of her adult acting peers in this film.
I thought some of the minor roles were much better written and more notable, namely Kevin Gage (as the psychotic Waingro, who screws up the initial heist and ends up on Neil's hit list), William Fichtner (as a shady high-level businessman who double crosses Neil) and Dennis Haysbert (as a frustrated parolee who joins Neil's gang last minute). I wasn't very enamored of Jon Voight's turn as a disabled retired criminal who was giving Neil the plans for his various jobs either. Again, another rather too-mannered, monotonous performance. Unfortunately, most of the characterizations lacked a certain amount of depth that really could have made this film better. The characters in general leave me cold. The film is so low-key that when the major dramatic moments happen, I don't feel as invested as I should.
A major complaint I have about this movie is that at around the 1- hour point, Hanna's team have the drop on Neil's gang as they are performing surveillance on them about to pull a major job, but Neil can tell he's been made and tells his team that they are walking. Hanna opts to let them go because they'd get only misdemeanor charges, thus the need for the film to go on for another close to 2 hours! The thing is that the film started with the gang pulling a major job where they robbed a federal bank truck and KILLED 3 armed guards! And Hanna knew they were behind it. So why couldn't they nail them on that after they arrested them, for armed robbery and attempted murder! You have to WAIT for them to pull another job and catch them in the act with innocent people involved? Major plothole.
Another is that late in the film, Kilmer's character basically gets away on a rather absurd plot point. The cops had already known what every member of Neil's gang LOOKED LIKE as they had police records on all of them. When the cops stopped Kilmer on the street to verify his identity, why didn't they have an actual PHOTO to see if it was him and not just go by fake IDs and driver's license? Pretty thin.
Of course, being a Mann film, it has a cool look and atmosphere and the robbery scenes are very tense and involving. The big shootout at about the two-thirds into the film is definitely a keeper. Also, I actually think the lack of a true score and music give the film a more realistic edge. Plus, the action scenes generally ring true as realistic as cars don't just explode randomly like they do in most action movies.
But it's really hard to get into any of the army of characterizations that really stretch and thin the movie out to being an overlong, somewhat self-indulgent essay on cops versus criminals. Commendable effort by Mann, just not one of his best!