De Niro v. Pacino... Fight!

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2018)

Not since Godfather Part 2 had Pacino and DeNiro been in a movie together and in Godfather 2 they were never on the screen at the same time. So, along comes Michael Mann and whoever else to convince these two heavy weights to do a movie together. They obviously agreed, but I wonder if part of the agreement was that the movie would be nearly three hours long? Must've been.
Pacino: "It's my movie."
De Niro: "It's my movie."
Mann: "We'll give you both your own movie within the runtime of this one."
Pacino and De Niro: "OK."
Even with Heat being a marathon of a movie it was still good. This was a high stakes cops and robbers movie with the leader of the cops, Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), trying to outsmart the robbers while the leader of the robbers, Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), is trying to outsmart the cops. This heist movie worked because you had some big time actors and a plot that was intelligent without trying to be too clever. Both sides made some smart and shrewd moves without either of them being overly complicated and relying upon myriad of high tech plot devices. We got to see some skillful gamesmanship without there being a lot of players and a lot of moving parts.
And the story within the story was one of work vs. family. We got to see two sides of the main characters: De Niro, Pacino, and Kilmer. All had a work-life and a family-life and none knew how to balance the two. Whether it's the good guy or the bad guy; if you dedicate too much time to your work then your personal life will suffer. Sure, one of the guys' job was that of a lieutenant with the LAPD and the other two were professional thieves but amazingly their personal life troubles were remarkably similar and for the same reason.
Heat pitted two dedicated alpha males against one another and said "fight". You couldn't watch without picking a side but only one could be the winner.