Introduction

“Heat” is a crime/thriller film released on December 15th, 1995. The movie is written and directed by Michael Mann, lasting 2 hours and 50 minutes. “Heat” is about multiple heisters lead by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), a criminal mastermind planning to pull off one last heist. Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) attempts to track him down and catch him with incriminating evidence. He does this while having to deal with problems in his own life like his wife (Diane Venora) cheating on him and the mental health of his stepdaughter (Natalie Portman). The movie scores an 83% on rotten tomatoes’ rating scale and a 94% from the audience score.

Background

The script was written in 1979. What originally was a script for a show ended up as a movie by the title of “L.A take-down” released in 1989. In 1994, Michael Mann revisited the script and turned it into a feature film, co-producing it with Art Linson. “Heat” was released by Warner Bros Pictures and gained commercial and critical success grossing 137 million dollars on a 60 million dollar budget. The film received praise for the movies’ screenplay, action sequence, and sound mixing, as well as Al Pacino’s and De Niro’s performance. The film is considered one of the most influential films in the crime/thriller genre.

Opinion

I personally liked “Heat” because of its story and its characters. The movie’s perspective constantly changes from the perspective of the bank robbers, LT. Hanna’s, and other characters. Most of the characters are well fleshed out and interesting, which I really enjoyed. In my opinion, the first half of the movie is a bit slow. In the second half of the movie, the story gets way more interesting as the events build up to the movie’s climax: the bank robbery and its aftermath.

Sources:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/heat_1995

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(1995_film)