Heat
Director: Michael Mann
1995
5 August 2025
See
Neil McCauley (Robert Di Niro) leads a crew of professional thieves; Chris Sheherlis (Val Kilmer), Michael (Tom Sizemore) and Trejo (Danny Trejo). Newcomer Waingro (Kevin Gage) murders an armoured truck guard in an otherwise flawless heist, which leads to their undoing with Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and his robbery homicide detectives in pursuit.
Think
Why is this the Greatest Of All Time action thriller movies? Besides the obvious spectacle of set pieces; of the armoured car robbery, the bank heist. Or the tension building in revenge against Waingro and the final confrontation between McCauley and Hanna. The stakes build in the quieter moments and characters develop. Mann considers every detail, and is even able to expand upon what happens before and after the movie in the book Heat 2 co-written with Meg Gardiner. Will there be an adaptation? Jack Kilmer could be a good replacement for his father, he proved his acting capabilities in Gia Coppola's Palo Alto. Although they’d probably want a star, even with somebody with more name recognition it would be a hard act to follow, Tom Hiddleston chose Heat as one of his favourite movies and described it as the all time great performance by Val Kilmer.
Back to Mann and his Letterboxd interview, why is Neil McCauley the way he is? What clothes did he wear in foster care as a child? Why did the bullying about that lead him to violent responses and juvenile detention, then the "gladiator academies” of prisons, which turned him into the professional criminal he now is.
That’s why when Vincent says he’s gone after all kinds of crews, and some want to get caught and asks Neil if that’s him,
“Do you see me holding up liquor stores with ‘Born to Lose’ tattooed across my chest?” McCauley responds. “I’m not ever going back.”
What makes Mann’s films believable is the attention to detail and precision of the performances. Like how Neil and Chris fire and reload, Mann had Di Niro and Kilmer train with live rounds before they filmed so that their movements were real, and tactile. It’s the relationships that make you care about the shoot outs and if they get away with it or are caught. From their fence Nate (Jon Voight) who sets up their scores, to even more significantly their families. Neil is “alone, not lonely” or so he says to love interest Eady (Amy Brenneman) for whom he breaks his thrice repeated rule, “You want to be making moves on the street, do not having anything in your life that you can not walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat coming around the corner.” Chris is a degenerate gambler, but is attached to his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd) and their son Dominic, even if his gambling addiction is driving them away. The flip side of that coin is what Neil says to Vincent over coffee in the scene that epitomises their game of cat and mouse, “If you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to hold onto any kind of normal life?” Meaning his third wife Justine (Diane Venora) and her daughter Lauren (Natalie Portman).
Feel
That diner scene while they drink coffee and size each other up is the chemistry at the core and the central tension of outlaw and lawman. Why do they do what they do?
“I don’t know how to do anything else,” says Hanna
“Neither do I,” replies McCauley.
“I don’t really want to.”
“Neither do I.”
If you’re judged by your calibre of your enemies, these two will be each others biggest and best. In this is the idea that your rival may know you better than anyone else, because it’s the same reason that motivates them, but done differently. Especially when you reveal to them your recurring nightmare about victims at a dinner table looking at you, or drowning before you can wake up and get your next breathe and not having enough time. Each could apply to either. Watching them is the conflicting feeling you get from a nature documentary of predator and prey, wanting one to get away and but disappointed that the other goes hungry.
