m3review: HEAT

HEAT

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12/8/95

Pacino.

DeNiro.

Pacino, DeNiro.

PacinoDeNiroPacinoDeNiroPacinoDeNiroPacinoDeNiroPacinoDeNiro.

Who could fail to be awed? What could be mightier than the coming together of these two titanic forces of nature? Was not the day we heard these two would be paired in HEAT akin to the day we were told Jack Nicholson was to play the Joker? Pacino - the top cop; DeNiro the chief thief. What could we expect but a cinematic apocalypse of galactic proportions?

Michael Mann.

Michael Mann must have thought the same thing. Michael Mann is the director of HEAT. He is also its screenwriter. Michael Mann is the creator of TV's Miami Vice and the director of several action movies, including LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Michael Mann must have said to himself, "This is going to be my GOODFELLAS. No. This is going to be my GODFATHER. No this is going to be my GOODFELLAS and GODFATHER rolled into one!"

Let me begin by saying, Michael Mann is neither Martin Scorcese nor Francis Ford Coppola. But I knew that going in.

The movie started off fine. DeNiro and his crew (which includes Val Kilmer) knock over an armored car - literally. It's a brilliantly hatched and well executed plan. Pacino arrives on the scene and catches the scent; the chase is on. It was what I expected from Mann.

But then, instead of focusing on the hunt and the heists, he repeatedly returns to family life scenes concerning Pacino and Kilmer's characters and an unlikely romance for DeNiro's. A side plot develops in which DeNiro's gang makes deals with the guy whose bonds they stole from the armored car. More characters are introduced and given scenes. Another side plot with a serial killer opens up. As the minutes piled up and the footage rolled on, a metronome began ticking in my head, softly, "dull.....dull.....dull...."

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with a rich plot or showing a character's family life. But the bulk of the scenes and the characters in them were so contrived and the editing so loose and dragging, I couldn't understand why Mann didn't just stick to the core story.

Slowly I realized what he was out to do. He was going for ...Epic.

Eventually, we come to the bank job. The screen that had been quiet almost since the opening, exploded with automatic weapons and shotguns. Glass shattered, cars crashed, people screamed. It's a great, climactic scene. A climax you could go home from and say, "That was a good movie."

But it wasn't the climax! It wasn't the end! HEAT dragged on for more than an hour afterwards. I was writhing in my seat. At one point, a cop says, "I'm going to get some coffee and we're going to sit until this thing is over with." I felt like saying, "Get some for me, too." As the credits finally rolled, someone behind me muttered, "That was so long, DeNiro could have gone to prison in the first scene and finished his sentence before the movie was over."

The funny thing is that even though Pacino and DeNiro were the leads in this movie, they shared only three, maybe four scenes. One of those scenes was dialogue; the rest were gunplay. And in all of those scenes, you never once see both Pacino's and DeNiro's faces on screen at the same time. It is entirely conceivable that these two men never acted together in making this movie.

I mentioned Val Kilmer as one of the supporting stars in HEAT. The rest of the supporting cast seems like a list of every performer ever mentioned on Film Flicks & Video Pix. There's Tom Sizemore, John Voigt, William Fichter, Wes Studi (Magua from LAST OF THE MOHICANS and the title character in GERONIMO), Hank Azaria (of TV's "The Simpsons") Ashley Judd, even Henry Rollins and the guy who played the knife-throwing hit man in DESPERADO.

HEAT is two minutes of trailer material and 2 hours and 43 minutes of filler. It will be left to a future generation to harness the combined power of Pacino and DeNiro and put it to constructive use for humanity.

P.S. If you want to know the ending, e-mail me.

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