Only partially fulfills the premise

Rating: 6/10 (2 October 2017)

"Heat" is an American 3-hour(!) film from 1995, so this one had its 20th anniversary 2 years ago. It is perhaps the most known career effort by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Michael Mann, even if this one here did not receive any Academy Award noms, seemingly even did not win a single award despite of how big of a project it was. The latter is proved by the inclusion of lead actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino here, the probably finest Italian-Americans Hollywood has to offer and one thinks immediately of the Godfather sequel of course when mentioning these names. So the premise here really was gigantic as you could expect a big conflict/rivalry perhaps between these two actors as they play characters on the opposite side of the law. But sadly, it never lived up to the premise. One problem is that they have almost no screen time together and the other is that you also never really felt the connection between them as it was intended. Instead it feels like each of them has their own film in this one here dealing with their messed-up private lives and complicated professional lives at the same time. I also feel that a great deal of this could have been left out and the film never should have made it past the 150-minute mark, probably even less.
Don't get me wrong: I don't think that the two story lines were really that bad, but just that they never got the connection through really and the showdown at the end, even if it was among the best the film had to offer, cannot make me look beyond that like apparently the many did who voted this film for some reason into the IMDb top250. I also felt that Pacino had a moment here and there where he seemed to be overacting while De Niro's subtle approach had a bit of a lackluster tendency to it. And I usually like these two. A lot even in Bobby's case. So yeah, there are several flaws in here, most of all that the plot and subplots had far from enough quality for this massive runtime. If they intended this as some defining crime epic, then it really went wrong. Maybe a mini-series would have been the better choice, but of course those weren't as popular back then in the 90s as they are today. I give this one a thumbs-up, but just a cautious one and looking at cast and crew here, this was really one of the biggest missed movie opportunities from the 1990s. Pacino, De Niro and Mann as well all have many far better projects in their big bodies of work. Known supporting players like Kilmer, Levine, Portman or Voight also did not have the material to shine. You can watch it if you are a RdN/AP fan, but don't get your expectations up that much. If not, you can skip it too and you won't be missing too much.