FLUXEUROPA: HEAT

FluxEuropa - dark music and more

FluxEuropa has suspended active publication and no longer requires items for review. The site is, however, being maintained as an archive and you can still order Amazon products which helps to subsidise its continuation.

HEAT (1995)

Director : Michael Mann

Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Diane Verona, Amy Brenneman, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Ashley Judd

This is Michael Mann's seventh feature film. Essentially, it is a character study of two sides of one man. "Vincent Hanna" (Pacino) is a highly-intelligent, emotionally-tortured cop. He meets his match in "Neil McCauley" a highly-intell.... you get the picture.

The first half of the film focusses on the high-tech thievery practised by De Niro and his gang. Super action, good suspense, culminating in a terrific shoot-out in downtown LA - plenty of pump-action shotguns and large-caliber automatic weapons, shattered windshields, frightened pedestrians and so forth.

The second half follows Pacino as he methodically encircles - and finally kills - De Niro. This is a chase movie. Separating the two is a meeting between the two protagonists in a coffee shop, where they - and we - realize that they are both cut from the same cloth, but on different sides of the fence. Both are emotionally bereft; both are married to their chosen occupations; both are brilliant at what they do.

There are numerous sub-plots, but the major one - which proves to be De Niro's undoing - involves a gang member he recruits. I'll shut up at this point.

This movie is three hours long. I suspect the first cut ran to seven or eight hours. The result is a film littered with loose ends. Characters are introduced, followed for a while - and then simply disappear. "Chris" (Kilmer) and "Charlene" (Judd) are a potentially fascinating study in their own right, but after a promising insight into their relationship, their story is allowed to drift to an unsatisfactory conclusion. "Eady" (Brenneman) is De Niro's emotional salvation, but her character is not fleshed out enough for us to identify with her or her attraction to "Neil".

Heat is two movies in one. Nonetheless, the acting is superb, and while it sags from time to time, the pace is usually brisk - no mean feat for 180 minutes.

It is instructive to compare Heat to Mann's first feature film Thief (starring James Caan). There are interesting parallels. I rather suspect that Heat is what Mann wanted Thief to be in 1981.

JOHN BLOWER - 2 February 1996