Review of Heat (1995) by Meritcoba — 10 Sep 2016

This movie has more stars than you can shake a stick at, with Pacino and de Niro taking most of the screen cake. Michael Mann brings with him his own visual style: extended long shots, mostly at night often at desolate places that isolate the characters. The movie starts with such a shot: the camera is set in between the elevated tracks of a metro railway and centered on a station silhouetted against the early dawn sky. The lights in the shot define what we see. A metro moves into view from the right and stops at the station. The next shot shows de Niro stepping out. We hear nothing but the music playing and the sounds of the metro and the city. An awesome shot.

The movie is carried by the acting and the visual style, but hampered by the weak and overburdened plot. No less than three relations are followed as side stories, which allows some roles for women, albeit in the overcrowded niche of troubled partnerships. Mann is not one for strong independent women or ones that stand by their men.. Despite all the women(or maybe because of this), this is a man's movie foremost. No pun intended.

The weakness of Heat is that Mann cannot quite make the plot stick. At the beginning, we start out with de Niro and his men robbing an armored money car with such gratuitous violence that it must have attracted crowds of onlookers as they are in the middle of LA, yet only one hobo was a witness to the events. This then is the reason that further on into the movie Pacino forestalls an arrest : they got nothing on them. Another event that is badly handled is when the gang is caught robbing a bank. Again overdone violence results(another Mann trademark) whereby the three crooks fight off a police force that out guns and out man's them. They not only manage to take out seven policemen but get away with the loss of one of them and one wounded. All thanks to their never ending supply of bullets.

Mann can not turn violence into something that does not hamper the plot. Shoot up half the town and nobody can point a finger. So, in the end, some ratting needs to be done, by a woman of course. But again: what evidence do they have that they did not have before? Nothing actually. So we just kill them all. With that the movie is actually about the morally bankrupt, perhaps another Mann trademark.

Women do get the short end of the stick. They are a source of trouble: if they aren't nagging they are cheating and if they aren't cheating they are selling out their partners. And if they do neither of those they are best at whoring, lying or cowering in fear. The message: women, you can't do without them, just don't expect much too of them. And maybe that is another trademark of Mann.

Short: it just takes too long and overreaches itself. Collateral is a lot better.