Brogan Morris continues our Al Pacino retrospective with Heat…
On release, Michael Mann’s Heat was sold as a showdown between the two greatest actors of a generation. Al Pacino would play a driven, half-crazed detective named Vincent Hanna, while De Niro would be career criminal Neil McCauley, Hanna’s nemesis by circumstance. But the much-hyped coffee shop scene the two actors share together would come and, ultimately, underwhelm. Not because the scene is badly written or because Pacino and De Niro lack chemistry – it was because Heat was always so much more than its casting coup. It was, and is, the crime epic of the 90s.
Pacino and De Niro are supported by a triumphant cast: Tom Noonan, Natalie Portman, Ted Levine, Wes Studi, Jon Voight, Tom Sizemore pre-career suicide and a relatively restrained Val Kilmer all lend colour to the broad canvas on which Heat is drawn. Pacino steals the show, though not always respectfully, treading a line between intentional dramatics and exaggerated self-parodying. But for scenery chewing, this is among some of Al’s best work; the “she’s got a GREAT ASS” line, delivered to an unsuspecting and appropriately shocked Hank Azaria, is a thing of towering beauty.
Truthfully, neither Pacino nor De Niro are at their best here – Pacino frequently overdoes it, whereas De Niro gives an ordinary performance as an ordinary character (it’s an early warning of the bland De Niro we’d soon have to look forward to, as his career entered paycheque season). But Mann sells the ‘two sides of the same coin’ thing between cop and crook, and besides he’s not making an in-depth character study here – with Heat, Michael Mann wants to make the crime movie his career had been building towards, and he succeeds.
With one of the US’s largest cities as the backdrop (LA plays itself to perfection), Heat is a big-scale thriller not so much of the cat-and-mouse variety, but one in which the principal opponents on either side of the law appear equally matched. The outcome is unknown – both Hanna and McCauley are flawed and just as deserving of our sympathy, and neither honestly represents law and order or a criminal element. Not really, anyway – they’re just two men who need the chase, with neither expressly concerned about what line of work they’ve individually chosen.
It relieves Heat of any self-righteous notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and purifies things for the typically ascetic Mann, who strips back dialogue, character development and visual flair for the sake of his main concern: the obsession of men at work, men who are able to sacrifice any kind of personal life for that all-consuming chase. It culminates in a quiet one-on-one at an airport more nail-biting than even the film’s blustering bank robbery centrepiece. Maybe Heat takes itself a tad too seriously, like all of Mann’s work, but if the director’s ever come close to genuine emotion, then it can be found in the form of an existential lament at the end of this film.
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
Originally published March 15, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
