Up There With GoodFellas, The Departed, The Godfather, and Scarface

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2007)

I had never realized Michael Mann was a genius before re-watching this film recently. I had seen Thief, Collateral, and Miami Vice, and though they are decent films, especially Collateral, I'd never thought of Mann as a master of his craft. When one sees Heat, they see the work of an ingenious filmmaker. The script is perhaps one of the most brilliant contemporary screenplays, because Mann as the writer is so honest with his material and characters that everything plays as naturally as one could hope for. Nothing is contrived, even the most complex symbolisms and the clearest testaments to the characters. We feel like we may have before seen the cops-and-robbers chase film wherein the hero and villain bond, and who knows? Maybe we have. Little of that matters because Heat is so well done. There is so much more to it that can be found from viewing to viewing to viewing. De Niro's stern, wary bank robber and Pacino's fixed, passionate cop feel more throughout the story than just an interest in each other. The film isn't just about the complex and wholly realistic connection that they feel. It's also about the objective statements pertaining to the audience, as we view the lives, in action and at home, of both cops and criminals, and we see how despite occupation, family life depends on what is offered by that cop or that criminal and the outcome is according to those projections.
Pacino and De Niro on screen in the same frame together was certainly a big deal when this film was coming out in 1995, and who could resist that concept? An idiot, yes, but hardly anyone else. But, between fanatics of these two unmistakably wonderful contemporary actors, let's just face it: They love themselves, and they nearly always play themselves. But the positive outlook on this fact, which it is, is that they still convince us that they thoroughly understand their very complicated characters. When people say that an actor plays himself, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are actually replacing a written character with their own personality. That's a cop-out. Many of the greatest contemporary actors "play themselves," so to speak, and we still love them and believe them. Pacino and De Niro are two of these actors, their presence always being the same swaggering, short-fused leonine tough guy, but being such fine actors they are masters of channeling facets of their presence to convey the people they are portraying. The scene in the restaurant where they meet and talk to each other over coffee is a perfect example of two actors who play themselves yet it's so terribly hard not to understand what every nuance of their facial expressions and verbal inflections mean and how subtly they communicate.
The two leads may overshadow for some fanatic filmgoers a few smaller performances. Val Kilmer, another actor with an irrepressible presence, is thrilling to watch as one of the hardened criminals in De Niro's heist crew. The opening armored car robbery shows each member of the crew in a cold, machine-like mode wherein they are nothing but armed raiders, everything else removed. The script cleverly gives them introductory scenes afterwards, and in Kilmer's, we immediately get an overall feeling of the dynamic, quick-witted, selfish, short-tempered, impatient daredevil he is whose weakness is impulse, which serves as a clever antithesis of his partner De Niro's rigidly scrupulous and organized way of living the criminal life. Also in the same scene, which is actually quite brief and not even one of the best in the film, Ashley Judd equates her side of the screen with the same density of presence and communication of character, a fiery but practical wife with convictions for her own strong, deep thoughts.
I used that scene as an example to display how surreptitiously the film's writing and acting coincide to make such an effective film despite the weight of the attention given to Pacino and De Niro against such a large remaining cast. A scene that I'll mention simply to get all jumpy like an action-loving teenage guy is of course the extensive, beautifully paced, extremely intense downtown Los Angeles machine gun shootout. What a work of art! I haven't been this dazzled by an action sequence in a long long time. And if it is not one of the all-time greatest, most well-directed and exciting action sequences ever put on film, then there's no such thing as a well-directed, exciting action sequence, because, friends, this gunfight is the example any dictionary would use if defining one. Not only does it send your heart straight through your head like an exit wound from a bullet, so much happens in that scene for so many characters that the film is much intensified from that point on.
And you know, the fact that by now, you've surely thought that maybe constructive criticism would do well in a review, since that's generally what reviews are for and because reviews don't sound very convincing unless they have it at some point. So, I should clarify that Heat is completely my kind of movie. It has heists, it has beautifully directed action sequences, and it stars two actors whose careers have garnered this sort of film as a staple. However, this is why one should take into consideration that my opinion is of some value when I say that Heat has a place very high in a genre that holds such classics of the past thirty or forty years as GoodFellas, The Departed, The Godfather, and Scarface.