So much for realism (and logic)...

Rating: 5/10 (8 May 2012)

I remember seeing this in my childhood and being extremely impressed with it. Some scenes have stayed with me all this time. However, revisiting "Heat" 17 years later was a disappointment. The story looks far fetched and riddled with clichés and improbabilities.
The main problem is with the selling point, which is of course the "Al Pacino- De Niro relationship". Here's the problem: no cop who does this job out of conviction could possibly respect/admire a criminal, especially one who has killed other police officers. So the ending is absurd and downright ludicrous. The famous coffee-shop scene that Pacino and De Niro share is ridiculous and pointless, entirely made for us, the viewers. At the public request, we present you Pacino and De Niro, face to face! The clash of the titans!
Not only there is no way in hell that a committed policeman would casually sit and chat with a criminal over coffee, but what they have to say is so silly – sharing thoughts about their messed-up private lives? Pacino trying to talk De Niro out of the bank robbery business? Seriously? Such a lame excuse to deliver the much anticipated De Niro- Pacino "moment"... The writing is terrible in this scene, as De Niro is also restating something he'd said earlier, therefore diminishing the impact of that line. Another example of bad writing and poor characterization is a scene where Jon Voight warns De Niro about Pacino's tenacity.
The constant shift to everybody's private lives was annoying and turned the whole thing into a crime-opera cheesefest. How many times have we seen the "frustrated cop's wife" act? And who cares about the bank robber's problems with his beloved wife, whom he occasionally cheats on? Oh, yeah, bank robbers are capable of love too. Touching! Talking about unlikelihood, De Niro's "romance" was laughable, and so was the transformation of an innocent librarian into an accessory to murder. The way Amy Brenneman switches from horror at what De Niro did to the "Oh, well, he's cute anyway" is hysterical. Moral relativism is an interesting topic for sure, but not here. There are moments that we're supposed to find moving, like the miscast Ashley Judd shedding a tear on the balcony or the cop hero Pacino holding hands with a criminal... What a joke.
The movie does contain some entertaining moments (although highly improbable), like the robbery scene. There's no way the Police would get into a shootout like that with so many civilians around. The suicide attempt scene is unnecessary and forced, and there are other flaws and extremely far-fetched/illogical scenes throughout, like DeNiro & the gang gracefully passing through police check-points without even wearing a disguise, just hours after the bloody robbery.
"Heat" is fairly entertaining only if you can ignore its inconsistencies and plot holes. The more I watch, the more I find it insulting to one's intelligence. I know it's "just a movie", but come on... it's a 3-hour movie, and such an amount of implausible developments make suspension of disbelief pretty hard. I swear, if Pacino had shed a tear in the end, I would have rated "Heat" with 10 stars and put it on my all time favorite "so bad they're good" list.