Nothing Special

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2007)

I accidentally set up an interesting juxtaposition with this film: the day after watching "Heat" I watched "Notes on a Scandal" (Cate Blanchett, Judith Densch). "Scandal" was twice as riveting and tense as "Heat", and this while being centered on two women schoolteachers and no guns. (I'm perfectly into cop movies, but it seems worth noting).
Al Pacino mostly acted like an impressionist doing Al Pacino. Robert De Niro was much more subtle; he gets the higher grade here. Supposedly this film is a little deeper than others like it because we get to know the domestic lives of the characters. Well, not really. By the end of the film we have no idea what the attraction is between Val Kilmer's and Ashley Judd's characters or what her loyalty is to him. Given some hints of Al Pacino's character's backstory, I can't imagine why his current wife, to the extent we know her, married him. At any rate, it's the usual cliché of the detective too obsessed with his work to be present for his family. Old.
Nearly every scene involving De Niro and his gang is worth watching. Nearly every scene with Pacino in that over-the-top mode of his is irritating and standard-issue for a 1970s gritty urban cop movie (except that this happens to be filmed in 1995). That includes the usual suspects, no pun intended, who people the gritty urban detective squad. So, figure 90 minutes not bad, 90 minutes irksome.