Michael Mann Watch: Heat (1995)

Watched:  02/25/2025

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  at most, my third viewing

Director:  Michael Mann

I saw Heat (1995) in the theater, and I am pretty sure I watched it again the next year on VHS.  But, friends, it's a three-hour movie - I have not watched it at all in this century.  Fortunately, Jamie had never seen it and was up for it this week.  

It's a 90's film nerd's star-studded affair, famous upon release for having both Robert DeNiro - riding high on Scorsese at this juncture - and Al Pacino - still hot from his Scent of a Woman* Oscar win (hoo-AH!).  But it also has Val Kilmer, Jon Voigt, Ashley Judd, Amy Brenneman, Wes Studi, Mykelti Williamson, Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine, William Fichtner, Henry Rollins, Dennis Haysbert, Tom Noonan, Tom Sizemore, Danny Trejo, Hank Azari and a tweenage Natalie Portman.  With a sprawling cast and not a ton of exposition, it doesn't hurt to be able to identify all of the characters easily by which actor we're looking at.

The movie follows a group of  professional heist-men performing a string of robberies in Los Angeles, starting with an armored car robbery that goes sideways when a new member of the team decides to shoot one of the security guards because he doesn't like his face.  This turns the heist from a robbery into murder charges (not wanting witnesses, they take down all three guards) and gets the attention of Pacino's relentless crusader of a cop.

The movie's overall goal seems to be to show the shattered private lives of both cops and robbers, and that having a chance for happiness with a family and home is both the ultimate goal and punishingly unobtainable.  For cops, the hours and need for focus and to feel the juice of a chase is what they live for, and marriages suffer.  For robbers, the chance of getting taken down any minute, to jail or death, means you shouldn't ever have anything tying you down.

And, as the movie begins, our cop, Pacino, is in his third (deteriorating) marriage and our robber, DeNiro, meets a woman (Amy Brenneman) he thinks is worth maybe bringing along, despite his rule of never having anything you can't walk away from in 30 seconds.

It's a world parallel to normie society, where the rules are different for both crooks and law enforcement, but they're more alike than different, once you get past the Barney Fife cops and into the Major Crimes Unit.  

The movie is famous for the diner scene between Pacino and DeNiro - where the two stars don't just share the frame, but come to an understanding between them.  It is when they realize in this crazy world, these two may be the only two to understand the other, and if they didn't have to exchange death threats, they would be probably sharing a beer once in a while.  Performance wise, it's also fascinating to watch as Pacino was in his HOO-AH era where he could just raise and lower his volume and that was acting.  Meanwhile, DeNiro is playing it as DeNiro, he's not matching that energy at all, and for a moment, Pacino remembers he's one of the finest actors produced by 20th century film.  And you can watch him become that guy over the course of the scene (and carry it into a scene with his wife).  

In some ways, Heat feels like part of an end of an era.  So much of the movie is "cops, robbers and the women who love them", while also never delving into who the women are.  We only know the profession of a single woman in the film, and there are no female cops or robbers.  And the role of Diane Venora's** character is to crumble because Al Pacino is married more to his job than to her.  

I do want to back it up and say - this isn't inherently bad, nor does it make the movie bad.  It's a product of an era, and the end of that era.  And it's not like Heat is begging to be a longer movie - clocking in at 2 hours and 50 minutes.   But I'd also understand if a younger viewer saw this movie and noted that women are on the outside here and had questions.

The other famous sequence is the gun battle in the streets of LA, which plays a bit different now in 2025 than in 1995 when we gave cops more leeway for resorting to violence in public (in movies).  For what it is, the bank heist scene is wild to watch both as just an action scene, and the explosion of tensions that have built up for the two previous hours.  Really, the movie never really takes its foot off the gas from when Tom Sizemore pulls his mask on.  

The sound is absolutely nuts in the sequence, as is the reminder of the damage that can happen with most assault weapons.  And, of course, people are hurt, die, etc... as bullets fly.  But you do have to believe that the entire LAPD would be put on review if such a shootout happened - banks are insured for a reason, and starting a war zone in the middle of lunch hour on busy streets doesn't really match "to protect and serve" when you could just tail them (not that Kilmer doesn't shoot first).

Of course, the movie is really about those doomed characters across the board, and how each character lets someone down or leaves their lives in wreckage.  All very romantic to the crime fiction fan or 20-something dude in the audience.  The domestic drama is as potent as the crime stuff, but you do have to put yourself in 20th century shoes for it to make sense.  And, of course, it's still addicted to the idea formed in the Hayes era that the crook has to die - which I think plays really well, honestly.

I like this movie.  I am aware it has its issues, and it's not something I'll come back to every year, but I realized I'd maybe missed it more than I thought.

 

*can we just agree that in 2025, Scent of a Woman is a weird and somewhat terrifying name for a movie?

**find it odd this is really the only major role I know her for.  She's really solid.

Also, she's fine as hell.