Review: Heat (1995)
“All I am is what I’m going after.”
For a significant part of my childhood, I have been led to believe that men have a specific role to fill in society. Whether it is to be stoic, a leader, a prideful worker, it boils down to a deep and hardened commitment to something over anything else in life. That is what I thought masculinity was. And that is what ultimately became the downfall for Robert De Niro’s Neil and Al Pacino’s Vincent.
Heat started as a typical crime thriller-flick where the crew pulls of a score but one of them did something wrong that led to the police hunting them down for the rest of the film. But behind this simple premise, lies a group of broken men, struggling to maintain a sense of balance and normalcy between having an ordinary life and being unable to escape their true nature.
And even though the criminals are obviously in the wrong here, the people that go after them, especially Vincent, aren’t as different as it seems. The length that Vincent will go to catch Neil is just astounding. The scene where he ‘waltz’ through those hospital stairs in such a gleeful manner to get Neil, even though his stepdaughter is unconscious in the hospital, just solidifies what kind of person Vincent really is. His marriage is falling apart right before his eyes and yet it does not matter because the chase is everything to him.
But what about Neil? He masquerades as someone that is cold, detached, professional, but as the film goes on, he constantly contradicts his code of not letting himself get attached to anything. He falls in love, he shows some level of compassion towards his crew, and he even exacts vengeance on those that harm them, even when he knew it would cost him greatly. That’s not to say he’s a great man, because in the end, he knows what he is, he can’t escape his nature. He’s a thief and just like Vincent, that way of living is everything to him, even until the very end.
Characters like Neil and Vincent show us that loneliness and death is the only thing waiting for them at the end of this journey of singular committed devotion towards their nature. That even though they are two sides of the same coin, where one cannot exist without the other, only one of them will come on top. This tragedy is not only at the cost of their lives but to the people around them. The big bank shootout highlights this perfectly, where numerous lives were lost just because two men decided to do what they do best.
Michael Mann’s Heat does not glorify these forms of masculinity but shows us that this sort of behaviour is nothing else but toxic and dangerous, to both themselves and to the people around them. But that’s not the only thing that this film is worth writing for. The cinematography and the dreamy atmosphere of the film is second to none in this crime thriller genre, where he definitely took heavy inspiration from the aesthetics of film noir in the way he composes each shot. Resulting in a film that has dream-like qualities to it but still being able to maintain a sense of grounded realism.
All in all, Heat offers the best depiction of numerous industry legends, working in their primes to deliver a singular project that is excellent and timeless in all aspects of film. And I for one cannot express how excited I am for the sequel.
