Pretentious and overrated

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 2009)

In Los Angeles, a gang of armed thieves is hitting serious targets - major banks, vaults, and armored cars. These thieves are led by arch-criminal Neal MacAuley. One of their operations, an armored-car robbery, goes bad and the armored-car guards are murdered by the gunmen - putting LAPD homicide detective Vince Hanna on the trail of the thieves. Hanna knows it will take a lot to bring these dangerous, armed thieves down, and it will end in a horrifying gun battle when the thieves try to rob a major federal bank... Heat is a pretentious and overrated crime thriller. I don't know about 1995 but as of today, the film fails to impress. The fact that Heat is hold as one of the best thrillers of all time is a joke. Michael Mann, himself, has done much better thrillers that don't have half the fame of Heat, like Collateral and Miami Vice for instance. First of all, the film seems to put all its chips in the reunion of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino instead of being an exciting thriller with a proper story and good writing. Good actors don't make a good film, it's as simple as that. The plot is convoluted, shallow and empty, and the side stories thrown in, like Pacino's suicidal stepdaughter and a gang member that turns out to be a serial rapist/murderer on the side are uninteresting and contrived. Plus, the action sequences are completely unrealistic with the thieves killing several cops and escaping despite being surrounded and completely outnumbered. Roberto De Niro was actually enjoyable as the gang leader Neal MacAuley, but he didn't have much room to expand or develop the character thanks to a mediocre script. On the other hand, Al Pacino, who I enjoyed in other films, was a huge disappointment. He was constantly trying too hard and had no sense of subtlety, he just screamed and yelled his lines without any real purpose. Val Kilmer, John Voigh, the great William Fichtner and a very young Natalie Portman, all had too little screen time to even comment on their performances. Another big problem, was the run time. The film drags and drags clocking at an amazing 170 minutes, almost 3 hours, when the story could have been easily told in 90 minutes or so. Overall, Heat is a mediocre thriller with a poorly written script that has gained much fame, only because, it stars two of the most well-known actors in Hollywood.
5/10