Heat (1995, R)

Directed by: Michael Mann

Grade: A

Heat operates like an action film that’s been made to actually work, and not just for the benefit of its audience, but also for the benefit of itself.   In a clearer sense, it’s easy to see how depraved Heat could have been, but because of all the rigorous energy director Michael Mann put into the project of making it a virtuous film, then we can even more easily see how much respect Heat really does earn.  As a result, Heat benefits itself by being an honest character study, rather than a hard-boiled action film such as the Die Hard or Rambo series. 

The film follows the lives of two men, one a brilliant cop (Vincent Hanna, played by Al Pacino) and the other a brilliant robber (Neil McCauley, played by Robert De Niro), over the course of several days in Los Angeles.  It’s the complications of the story that make Heat so complex, as Mann wisely allows the main stem of the plot to branch out into the supporting character setup and revisions, unexpected turns of events and the moral complications that ensure.  What’s important to note here is that we come to understand the major characters so well, and this is strengthened in every scene that comes after the last. 

It then becomes clear, to us, that Mann has introduced us to two of the most multifaceted characters in film history.  We ask ourselves, what motivates these two men?  What are they trying to gain?  Vincent contends with his own personal problems, and yet absolutely refuses to let his work get in the way of his personal life; he’s respected by the men on his team, and he stops at nothing to bring justice to Neil’s tight-crime syndicate.  Neil, on the whole, isn’t much different.  He’s a lonely individual on the inside, and he only really conducts bank robberies for his own purposes: what he wants is to retire with his girlfriend, and forget his past.  He keeps his guys well uniformed and together, but when strikes us most is how Neil is a more empathetic kind of movie villain, in that he, unlike so many other movie bad guys, actually cares for the members of his gang: he risks his own life when he draws a wounded Chris (Val Kilmer) out of the line of fire in the middle of a shootout, is honest everyone he meets (whether he has good or bad intentions), and makes Chris’s wife promise that she’ll give her husband a second chance after he walks out on her.  We are therefore able to come to a far more of an understanding with his character.  Vincent is a tightly-packed, classic LAPD cop who attempts to keep his emotions within himself and not to others; Neil is nothing less than a revolutionary crime figure.

Besides the character developmental aspects that truly prevail in Heat, we are also laid witness to how well furnished the film really is.  It’s obvious that just by watching Heat, even from a cold distance, that Mann had made sure that every detail, from the basic to the precise, was refined and distinguished to the give the film an accurate, callous, realistic feel for the combat of crime in L.A.  Mann offers us four brilliantly played scenes in Heat’s narrative: the opening armed robbery sequence, the coffee shop scene where Vincent and Neil confess their personal complications to one another (and yet still admit that they won’t hesitate to shoot the other if they feel the ‘heat’ coming around the corner), the celebrated shootout after Neil’s gang has robbed a bank, and the final sequences in which Neil exacts his final revenge, not knowing that Vincent has already cornered him in. 

This film has received so much praise for being the epic showdown between de Niro and Pacino on screen, but in reality, Heat is in need of greater recognition than for simply that: it’s so character driven, so story oriented, and so supremely fashioned that it seems as if Mann has crafted the tour de force of action crime dramas.  Indeed, Heat does have much more going for it than most other films of the genre for these very reasons.  Heat is successful as a both a work of art and as a work of entertainment, and, when it adds up as a tale of vengeance, reckoning, passion and redemption, it finds itself as one of the finest crime films of all time, for all time.  A