Heat (1995)

rating: ****

the story: An epic showdown between cop and criminal.

review: Long billed as the long-awaited pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino onscreen together (they previously both appeared in Godfather Part II, but in separate sequences), Heat is actually an embarrassment of riches, in hindsight, full of actors who would populate the big and small screens for years to come.  And it's arguably the predecessor to The Dark Knight in terms of action movies.

Here's the talent assembled for Heat: De Niro, Pacino.  Val Kilmer and Natalie Portman.  Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd.  Jon Voight (who like Kilmer sports long hair for the movie).  Tom Sizemore.  Mykelti Williamson, who the year previous had his breakthrough appearance as Bubba in Forrest Gump, and would later play another cop in the underappreciated TV gem Boomtown.  Dennis Haysbert, years before playing a president in 24, or helping us be in good hands with All-State.  Danny Trejo.  William Fichtner, who still has yet to be properly noticed.  Wes Studi, Hank Azaria, Xander Berkeley (who also later appeared in 24).  And Jeremy Piven, another talent who deserves much greater recognition for his screen presence.

And they're all here!  Just spending the time enjoying them make their appearances, large and small, is worth watching this one.

Of course, it circles back to De Niro and Pacino.  De Niro is in subdued mode, not the outsize gangster he is in Scorsese movies but more as he appears in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, two years later.  Pacino, as he often does, chews a lot of scenery, but when it counts, he matches De Niro's mood, and it's everything you always heard Heat was.  These are screen giants, and their epic showdown is exactly what it was always supposed to be.

But Michael Mann, who made his name in television, including Miami Vice (which he later adapted to the big screen in the same mold as Heat), isn't merely interested in acting.  He's got a big action movie in mind, in the kind of scope he basically perfects, in the years before superheroes came to dominate the genre, in the years after the '80s saw them dominated by action stars.  This is an experience that crosses all boundaries. 

And yeah, it's exactly the kind of experience that Christopher Nolan later duplicated for The Dark Knight.  The hype and magnetism of Heath Ledger's Joker was what everyone talks about, but Nolan was the first director since Mann to nail this kind of action movie.  And at its heart, Dark Knight is more this kind of action movie than it is a superhero movie, and I think that's what Nolan realized, and was going for, and what audiences liked so much about it, too. 

If Heat doesn't get talked about enough these days as a milestone of the '90s, and filmmaking in general, it's because it's remembered now for the De Niro/Pacino pairing, and the fact that after this their careers were never quite the same again.  De Niro reached a dramatic peak, and went in the direction of comedy, and Pacino became dismissed for what's since become best illustrated by Nicolas Cage, the idea that acting style is suddenly a crime, where the idea of movie stars has slipped by the wayside.  Which is ironic, as the dawn of the modern blockbuster begins with a movie where the acting is, distractedly, the whole point, by observers who can't quite keep the whole scope of the experience in mind.