Cop and Robber

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2015)

"Heat" reunited Robert De Niro and Al Pacino for the first time since their starring roles in "The Godfather Part II", a film in which they never actually appeared on screen together. (They were later to act together again in "Righteous Kill" from 2008). Like both those films, this one is a crime drama; here the two stars play adversaries on opposite sides of the law. De Niro is Neil McCauley, a professional criminal who organises a security van heist in the course of which three guards are killed. Pacino plays Lt. Vincent Hanna, the L.A.P.D. detective charged with investigating the crime. The plot gets very tangled, so I will not attempt to summarise it any further.
The name "Neil McCauley" was taken from a real criminal on whom De Niro's character is partly based, although he was from Chicago rather than Los Angeles. The character of Hanna was based upon Chuck Adamson, the detective who tracked McCauley down. I wonder if the name "Vincent Hanna" was borrowed from the well-known British television journalist, who would still have been alive when this film was made in 1995. (He died in 1997).
Of the two big stars, Pacino is certainly the better. Hanna is quite a complex character; the film deals not only with his attempts to solve the crime but also with his problems in his private life. He already has two failed marriages under his belt and his third marriage is also troubled because the long hours he has to work, and his obsessive dedication to his job, are placing his relationship with his wife under strain. Pacino copes well with the difficulties of conveying the two sides of Hanna's personality, the dedicated, almost workaholic professional and the struggling family man.
I was not, however, so impressed by De Niro. After starring in films like "Mean Streets" and "Godfather II" in the seventies, he became almost synonymous with crime thrillers, and I am not convinced that this has always been to the benefit of his career. At his best he is, of course, one of the greatest actors working in the American cinema, but at times he can fall well below that best. It is notable than many of his best performances have come when he has tried something different in films like "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", "King of Comedy", "The Mission" and "The Fan". Now most, perhaps all, of those films can be characterised as "crime films" in that they involve criminal acts committed either by De Niro's character or by someone else, but none of them fall into the standard "gangster epic" or "cops and robbers" formulae. When De Niro does appear in standard crime dramas it sometimes seems as if he is simply retreating back into his comfort zone where he does not need to try very hard.
That is precisely what happens in "Heat". His performance is not particularly bad, but it is mediocre, lacking the spark of brilliance which he can bring to those films which really stretch him and challenge him to do more than falling back on the tried and trusted. Also, his delivery is at times below par and I found it difficult to catch some of his lines. I never had that problem with Pacino. The one time De Niro really comes to life is in the scene where McCauley and Hanna meet in the coffee bar. While watching the film I felt this scene was a bit unrealistic, but in fact the real McCauley and Adamson did indeed once have such a meeting.
Heat was a commercial success, and was generally well received by the critics, but I can't say that it is a film that I cared for very much. My main complaint would be that at nearly three hours it was too long. Some will doubtless reply that the film needs to be this long to deal adequately with all the complexities of its plot, but it is these very complexities which are part of the problem. The film would have worked a lot better with a more straightforward storyline, fewer characters and greater concentration on the main McCauley/Hanna confrontation. 5/10