Movie 108: Heat

Robert De Niro plays a thief, Al Pacino plays a cop. They are trying to avoid/capture each other. Both of them have pretty fucked up personal lives. And they have coffee once. That’s about it.

Really, that is about it. While Heat does have a fair few good points, it is FAR from being a masterpiece.

For one thing, my plot description mentions two characters. For the most part so does the script. The two main guys have their respective crews, and those crews have wives or girlfriends sometimes. Both leads have their own personal relationships. But the people outside of the leads aren’t exactly rounded out.

They aren’t all just characateurs or anything. The members of De Niro’s gang don’t say all that much. And seeing as they are all pretty integral to the plot makes that a bit of a travesty. Tom Sizemore’s character is a first hole to the gang, but we never see that or really know anything about him. Val Kilmer kind of zombies through a lot of the picture, but he’s a relatively significant B plot in the last half of the film. In some kind of reverse Samson manoeuvre his acting seems to significantly improve when he has a hair cut. I’d say it was hampering his acting to have long hair if he wasn’t a bad ass in Willow.

And poor Danny Trejo. He’s literally an after thought until towards the end when he becomes plot important

The cops are better written, though it doesn’t get in to any of their personal lives outside of Pacino. Which is fine. But in a 160 minute movie they should have done a better job of rounding out the people that they DID focus on.

Pacino’s relationship is a mess due to his obsession with his job. Nothing new there. But it works fine in the glimpses we get. Natalie Portman does well as his step daughter, but once again she’s kind of glossed over so her actions don’t have really well known motivations. And are important to the plot. His character seems to have random out bursts which were explained by an early draft coke habit, but then that was taken out and the behaviour was left. Great writing there Mann….

De Niro’s relationship makes the least sense. I think we get to see two dates in the first half ish of the movie, so he barely knows the woman he’s with. When they are together there really doesn’t seem to be shit loads of chemistry, mainly because of the way his character is portrayed.

It just feels like Mann came up with a few plot bullet points, then went back and kind of shoved characters in to the script to fit them at the time. It detracts from the movie to have two fully focused on leads and half assed surrounding characters. The plot itself is decent, could have been great, if it wasn’t for the fact that the whole thing feels strangely draggy AND jumpy.

I guess its worth a watch. If it was shorter then yeah, but its 3 hours out of your life more or less. Up to you really.

Next up: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which I probably shouldn’t watch with the cold as I need my brain…