Turn Down the Heat

I recently watched Heat, the Michael Mann movie about a top notch thief and his crew, and the obsessive detective trying to capture him. Holy crap, what a cast this this movie has. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd, Ted Levine, Dennis Haysbert, William Fichtner, Natalie Portman... and more.

And therein is the first hint of trouble with this film. The script tries to give too many of them their due. Ultimately, the story is just about these two consummate professionals -- in opposing professions -- going against each other. But the movie gets mired down in the lives of their families, their contacts, their other adversaries. Though this is surely intentional, to help give a full context for events, things linger on these bits of backdrop at the expense of narrative momentum.

The film starts off quite exciting, and outlines the interesting stakes within the first 15 minutes. But the more the movie drags on, the less engaging it becomes. And boy, does it drag on, for a total of nearly three hours. It's sad that the action beats become the most interesting thing in the movie, because this shouldn't be evaluated as a "Big Dumb Action Movie." The cat-and-mouse game of two incredibly intelligent characters should be enough to sustain.

Instead, what's left isn't smart enough for a battle of wits. It's not exciting enough for an action movie. It's not emotional enough for a drama. It's not clever enough for a heist movie. It's not tense enough for a suspense movie. It's just a bloated mess of half-baked movies all swirled together.

With, yes, incredible acting.

But that wasn't nearly enough to hold my interest for three hours. I rate Heat a D+. You'd be better off going actor by actor through the cast and finding better films in their filmographies, even though that would take considerably more time. I think it would feel like a lot less, actually.