Review of Heat (1995) by Aodhan R — 15 Jan 2015

I've always been fascinated with the work of Al Pacino, ever. Since watching 'Scarface' and he still continues to deliver excellent performances through his success. And Robert De Niro is a terrific actor whom I've started to have a similar feeling about. He's also appeared in a lot of critically acclaimed movies, especially with Martin Scorsese, and I plan to watch some of those.

'Heat' features an interesting cast of familiar faces such as: Tom Sizemore, Wes Studi, Val Kilmer, William Fichtner and Natalie Portman (uncredited) - with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro playing the leads.

There's little character development on the side, but not much to offer as was expected. The main focus is mainly De Niro's character, a criminal called Niel McCauley. This focus of the movie is extreme and De Niro pulls that off really well with his unique talent and ability to play those sort of villainous roles.

Pacino is also excellent and gives yet another great performance to the screen as the homicide detective Vincent Hanna, whose leading the case to bring a gang of professional bank robbers, led by McCauley, to justice. Pacino also brings Hanna to life with his usual disticntive sense of humour, and he said some funny one-liners and cracked some jokes in different elements of the screenplay, which was quite good.

As well as fabulous performances there's also credit to be given to director Michael Mann, whose probably made one of the finest movies of his career, and it was produced very well and made from a finely written screenplay.

What I loved the most was De Niro's scenes; how he debated upon the shares of money the gang members were to get from their bank heists and their newly planned one. Also his brief scenes with Jon Voight and Val Kilmer were also watchable, due to the dialogue they used, which was strangely hard to follow at times, but that's what amuses me (it's just like how some fancy dialogue used in Scorsese's 'The Departed' was tricky to follow at times, but still presented the movie in a unique way).