28 Years Later, Heat Still Pulls No Punches
Sometimes life lets you down easy, other times it punches you in the face. After a while, you’ve been punched so much and so often the world looks like a boxing match and that boxing match becomes a chess game. You wait for the other shoe to drop and when it doesn’t come you stick out your arms and yell “Well, what are you waiting for?” And everyone knows but no one can quite know the same way you know it. In a world like this it’s better to brace for misery than open up to hope.
“Allow nothing in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if there’s heat around the corner” Vincent De Niro’s Neill McCauley says. He’s the criminal but he’s more of the intellectual while Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna is probably more of the bulldog. The chemistry between these two is electric, even though they’re only on screen together a handful of times. It’s the changeup and rhythm of the two that make the movie work. Their cat and mouse game pulls the movie forward, with McCauley often outsmarting Hanna at first but Hanna never making the same mistake twice, hot on McCauley at all times. And through this very delicate cat and mouse game the two men begin to understand each other. The two guys even chat in a coffee shop, fully aware of who the other one is at one point. It’s astounding and slightly ridiculous but Michael Mann makes it cool. The cop-criminal bromance angle is a little strange, especially since Al Pacino makes it clear to his wife that Vincent De Niro’s crews actions are pissing him off.
A large part of why Heat works is because it leans in to tell a deeper story, one that encompasses the micro and macro of cops and robbers. The difference between an action film and a film with action is that one tries to make some sense of what is going on on the screen. Heat is a crime film, not an action film. The effects of crime are felt heavily throughout the narrative and they dominate even the emotional sides of the story. Al Pacino’s struggles with his wife and step daughter (played by a 14 year old Natalie Portman) are just as heavy and suffocating as the violence and suffering he witnesses. The guy just can’t catch a break but he also never looks for one. At one point he catches his wife in the process of cheating. He proceeds to take his tiny personal TV and drive around with it in his car to make the point: the new man can bang his wife but he sure as shit can’t watch his TV. It’s a funny moment but also kind of sad. He’s on his third wife and a fourth is probably on the way.
De Niro’s Vincent Hanna is no better. For all his dogma about “walking out in 30 seconds”, he’s got his own woman problems. He falls for a graphic designer named Eady and ends up trying to get her to go away with him. The crazy part is he almost succeeds. She agrees to go and they would’ve made it…if not Hanna having to avenge his partners. So much for walking out in 30 seconds. Heat is a movie about criminals and the men who catch them but it takes careful steps to follow its own rules. Until Hanna fell in love and decided to become a loyal guy he was slippery as an eel. When the heat is around the corner he’s gone.
Val Kilmer’s Chris Shiherlis (this is not a last name) is the same way, struggling with the woman in his life even as he leans into the life of crime. It seems like he could actually save his relationship but he’s in too deep. Pro tip: when you need to rob a bank, you don’t need the money. All of the criminals in the film are given an out at one point-Hanna considers not robbing the bank but unfortunately, everyone decides to go for it. It’s always the last job that goes poorly.
This bank sequence is iconic-after a relatively smooth robbery, the LAPD shows up and the streets of L.A become a battlefield as Hanna’s crew fires automatic weapons at the cops, taking out a vast majority of them. It has to be one of the most visceral scenes in cinema, with Val Kilmer firing an AR into LA traffic like Rambo. Countless dead, carnage strewn throughout..it’s a cinematic marvel. Everything goes wrong for everyone involved.
It kicks into gear this high octane chase to catch the criminals but also to resolve the deeper personal conflicts. Robert De Niro has to convince his new ladyfriend to flee the country with him. Val Kilmer tries to meet up with his wife, who is being used as bait in a police sting. Al Pacino goes home to his wife and that man. Then when he gets back to his hotel he finds Natalie Portman inexplicably floating in his tub with her wrists slit. It makes no sense but Pacino’s frantic rush to the hospital gets the adrenaline pumping. As the old Russian proverb goes “And then it got worse.”
The final showdown is poetic but understated, a 1v1 on an airport tarmac. It’s a well shot and tough scene, with De Niro and Pacino using the light of the airplanes to try and make each other out in the darkness. It’s the calmest gunfight in the movie but also the most interesting. It’s a crime movie and the criminal always dies so of course Pacino walks away the winner. But he makes sure to squeeze De Niro’s hand as De Niro passes, suggesting that in some ways the men share a bond, predator and prey, that transcends all of the other broken relationships we see in the film.
Heat is one of those movies that gets even the wrong things right, the oppressive atmosphere, the scumbag characters, the edgy violence and most of all the emotional devastation it causes on a wider scale. It shows the consequences of death but shows no regard for life. And it is perhaps all the better for it. It is a portrait of people whose lives have been ripped apart by violence and bad intention, even with the smallest of stakes. It’s a big story made up of small ones, a web of relationships that can all be broken into more personal ones.
But aside from all that, it’s important to note just how much of this movie is about Al Pacino being insane. He has coffee with Robert De Niro even though he knows De Niro is the bad guy. He’s mean to his wife. When De Niro’s crew robs a bank Al Pacino wages a gun battle on the streets of Los Angeles, civilians be damned. He has this little TV on the table that he watches as he eats and at the conclusion of the film he removes it from the house and proceeds to drive around the city with it. There’s parts where Pacino suddenly doubles his volume. At one point he goes on a rant about women's asses. The whole thing with his stepdaughter is weird-why is she in his hotel? Who takes a bath with clothes on? It’s chaotic and hard to look away from.
De Niro is really good at this as well. His character is more calculated and cold. He doesn’t run as hot as Pacino but there’s an intensity there that drives the performance. Val Kilmer is solid in this film, showing a solid range even if he doesn’t have as much screen time as the two stars. He’s a bad husband and a bad father and he kills like 10 people in the bank robbery scene but somehow at the end of the movie I was rooting for him. The women in this film are good. Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd and Natalie Portman all toe the line between melodrama and reality in their performances. Jon Voight is in this too but it’s something between a cameo and a supporting role. This is a very well made film, but the thing that holds it together is the actors. Their ability to all play on the same level and convey the same tone across the whole experience are crucial to the execution of this Michael Mann staple.
Heat is a movie I think you should watch, if you have 3 hours to kill and a six pack nearby. It holds nothing back and is proud of its identity and its quirks. It doesn’t try to be timeless, it leans into its proclivities and lets a movie be a movie. It’s the type of movie where I could recognize its quality but I also knew not to pick it apart. It’s not The Prestige. Heat is the type of movie that can give you a rush but it can also make you think. It’s an action drama, by a good director, the action charged with emotion and loaded with weight, a feeling one gets from a higher type of fare than Transporter or Gumball Machine Gun. It was strange, I was parked on my couch for 3 hours and yet after watching this behemoth of a movie, I felt as though I had done something with my day. It made me want to sip hard liquor and look at my cat and say “Gee Gipper it’s a rough world out there. Rough tough world.” Rough tough world indeed.
