Has potential, but is far too long

Rating: 7/10 (23 May 2006)

About ten years ago, I sat and watched Heat with my family. Despite the three hour runtime, I was the only one who managed to sit through the entire thing without falling asleep. At the end of it, I really did not like it at all. I thought it was overly boring, and ran for way too long. My vast film knowledge was not even a fraction of what it is today at that point, but for years to come, if anyone ever asked if I had seen it, I said the same thing to them. So in the last two years, I've caught various parts of it, and was totally immersed within the film, despite my previous ideals about it. I never managed to watch it beginning to end at any point (usually just the same parts over and over), so I finally decided to crack down and watch it.
Heat runs along the lines of a parallel story between two characters: Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro). Hanna is a Liutenant with the LAPD, and basically spends his life tracking down and arresting criminals. His social life is totally absent, and it shows with the frustration his third wife Justine (Diane Venora), has with him. McCauley is a skilled thief, who is hired on various jobs with his crew, and lives by a very straight, and by-the-books lifestyle. He consistently delivers lines about being able to walk away from anything if any situation was to come up. For that reason, his social life is a mess too.
Both are basically the same conflicted character, just on two sides of the law.
With the film running for three hours though, you can tell that this is just a very basic idea of what the film is about. It is littered with dozens of subplots involving secondary characters, and even deeper subplots with the main characters. It seemingly goes on and on, until it finally meets the ending, which never seems to come soon enough.
While DeNiro is his usual great acting self here, there was something about Pacino that was just, not right. Watching the film, I could never figure out just what it was, but it was so easily noticeable that it was not on the same level as his performances in Scent of a Woman, The Godfather or Scarface. He's a great, versatile actor, and he's undoubtedly one of the greatest of the last thirty to forty years. But something just does not click here the same as it does with DeNiro. Of course, DeNiro's performance does not rank up there with the likes of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver, but it is still much better overall than Pacino's.
The supporting cast which features Venora, Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight and Tom Sizemore among others, are all just good. None of them really stand out performance wise, and none of them stand out as even close to matching anything that DeNiro puts forth (or Pacino for that matter). They are secondary to the two big actors, and they know it. They follow Michael Mann's writing to the tee, and make little to no progression in making their characters any greater than they can be.
As said, Mann's script and direction really hurts this film. It is too long. Easily, a whole thirty minutes could have been excised right from the film, and it still could have had potential for greatness. Collateral was a straight two hours, and felt brisk, yet got so much accomplished. Why could this "saga" not have been so much more tightly packed in? The layers of subplots really damage the film and its impact, and really damages any sort of astonishing acting to be done. The audience is bored, and so are the actors. Is that not obvious Mann?
But I will admit, the film has some fabulously choreographed sequences. The LA street shootout between the thieves and the cops is just astonishing. That one scene I mentioned above that I kept continually seeing? This was it. And watching it within the film really made me feel how sad it was to see such a great scene come so long after the lengthy scenes before it. It looks and sounds amazing. The cinematography within the scene is top notch, and is so well paced, that you have to ask yourself why the rest of the film was not done nearly as well. Yes, the film has a variety of other top-notch shots and visuals, but some are just overkill. And others are just unneeded. It was almost like Mann really wanted to make this film continue on forever, and try and throw some of his excellent style in to try and make up for it.
Sorry to say, but it just does not help the film in the end.
While some films have gotten better since I first watched them years ago, others have not changed. This film, sadly, is one of them. It has great potential, and some great sequences, but it just does not know well enough as to when it should stop. It's too long, and it has way too much going on in it for it's own good. It's not a bad film for this reason, but it's not an amazing one either.
7/10.