I Did Not Care for Heat (1995)

I did not care for the 1995 movie Heat starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro with Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, and my GOAT Danny Trejo in supporting roles. A lot of people like this movie, and I say more power to 'em, but I just do not understand why.

All of These Guys Suck Balls

The movie, for those who haven't seen it, is about LAPD detective Vincent Hanna and professional robber Neil McCauley. The supporting cast is mostly on McCauley's end, his crew, but the story primarily revolves around the cat-and-mouse chase between two deranged masters of their craft, Hanna and McCauley.

The problem is, they both fucking suck.

Look, to be clear, I am not demanding that every movie have a perfectly morally unambiguous definite good guy for me to root for. I'm fine with moral ambiguity, I like it, even, when it's done well! I love Nate Ford in Leverage, and he's a bona fide piece of shit for the first three and a half seasons of the show.

But I need something to root for, someone to hold on to and be like, "Okay, this is the narrative pivot of this plot, and they're who I wanna get invested in, got it."

But McCauley and Hanna eat the most screentime, with Kilmer's Chris Schiherlis on a close third and everyone else fucked off into a rounding error, and all three of these guys are just ass. They have no charm (which is honestly kinda stunning, that they managed to turn Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro into charisma vaccuums), no real motivations, nothing that makes me go, "Oh yeah that's a realistic human guy who I understand on some level."

All three of them just feel like vague amorphous agglomerations of various vices. Hanna is addicted to his job, to the exclusion of all else, up to and including destroying three marriages, the third on-screen. McCauley steals, sure, he makes gangbusters doing it, but he doesn't do anything with it. He has no passions, no hobbies, no family, no investment into anything. He's just an NPC doing it like a day job and then going home and not even having the decency to mope about it.

Shiherlis is the worst of the lot, though. A deadweight drag on the plot and the characters, he doesn't even bring any sort of mildly compelling character dynamic the way McCauley and Hanna do. He's just a degenerate gambler who blows all his money on sports betting and then abuses his wife when he loses all their savings!

Actually, let's talk about the women in this movie.

Holy Fuck This Shit is So Fucking Mysoginistic

The women in Heat exist to serve one purpose: to inconvenience the men. The sole exception to this is a full-service sex worker who instead serves the purpose of getting murdered for, as far as I can recall, no actual purpose except to show that Waingro (we'll get to him) is a deranged lunatic murderer, something that is already established in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Hanna's wife Justine spends all of her time on-screen either yelling at Hanna about their failing marriage, or killing herself. She has no personality, no motivations, no desires, no internality beyond wanting him to be a better spouse. She doesn't do anything except show us that Hanna is a shit husband, something Minority Report accomplished with an establishing shot of a Divorced Dad Apartment and a scene of Anderton watching home videos of his dead son.

Shiherlis's wife Charlene is slightly better, because she at least has the decency to cheat on him and then almost sell him out to the cops. Ya know, plot! Still misogynistic as all fuck but at least she does something.

The only other woman in the movie is Eady, a graphic designer who becomes McCauley's extremely forced and utterly uninteresting love interest with whom he wants to run off to fuckin'…Fiji or something I dunno, Truman Show is a better movie and I wish I'd rewatched it instead. Her only narrative purpose is to 1) arguably be the reason McCauley doesn't cut and run when he realizes Hanna has them made, and B) to get him killed at the airport going after her.

The women in this movie not only have no agency, they also have no relevance to the plot 90% of the time, nor do they define their male counterparts in any way beyond being the Ol' Ball and Chain Bitch Wife Who Wants to Watch Orange. Justine could've been done away with entirely, Eady could've been replaced by a cancer diagnosis, and Charlene is basically just an avatar for her husband's gambling debts and their tangible consequences.

Diane Venora, Ashley Judd, and Amy Brenneman give fantastic performances as Justine, Charlene, and Eady, and they're utterly squandered, performances I would each watch as standalone stories. And yet the film just doesn't seem to have any interest in doing anything with them. It's wasteful, it's trashy, but most of all it's just disrespectful, both to the actresses and their amazing work, but also to the audience who has to watch them weave interesting characters from all the nothing Michael Mann gave them to work with.

Al Pacino (Derogatory)

Pacino's performance in this movie can best be described as Al Pacino. Hanna as a character exists largely as a big block of tofu to absorb the Pacino Sauce, but the problem is Pacino brings no sauce to this performance or this character. He's either grimly monologuing at someone about how he's a super cool hypercompetent detective and McCauley is a super cool hypercompetent thief, or he's yelling some vulgar shit really loud and making someone uncomfortable.

He's not a bad actor, the problem is he's not really playing Vincent Hanna, he's just playing all the parts of Tony Montana that people remembered like two weeks after watching Scarface. He doesn't bounce off DeNiro because there's nothing there to bounce off of, he's a fucking NPC with no clear reason why he's doing anything at all, so he just ends up shouting really loudly into an empty room and we're just forced to sit there and tolerate the performance.

The sole exception to this is the diner scene, and I will readily admit that it was quite well-executed – even if I think Daredevil: Born Again pulled off a much stronger execution of the concept by virtue of having characters who I actually cared about, and making them behave like real people, by having them talk about common interests (a favourite restaurant, shared history) before gradually escalating from veiled threats into open declarations of war. Real people don't sit around drinking coffee and monologuing their worldview at each other!

But by the end of it, I felt more disappointed, not less. The bones are clearly there, DeNiro and Pacino are clearly really Goddamn good actors who are absolutely capable of taking this one to the bank, but they just are never given any room to actually explore the latent space of their character dynamic.

Even in the diner scene, it still fundamentally feels more like watching two aliens interact – which to be clear is undoubtedly compelling – than it does watching two human characters who are supposed to feel like people. Hanna is neither lifelike nor larger-than-life. He's just an asshole.

The Plot, Insofar as There Is One

The plot of Heat feels profoundly contrived. The entirety of the movie is levered around one guy, Waingro, a lunatic killer who for some fucking reason gets added to the usual crew for the armoured car knockover at the start of the movie. No one really knows who he is, he doesn't actually do anything except stand around and murder a guy for no fucking reason, and it isn't clear where they found him or why they decided to put him on the team.

From here, Waingro somehow escapes despite being on the floor at McCauley's feet with a gun pointed at his head in an empty parking lot, which feels like an extreme contrivance all on its own, standing up makes noise, you're telling me he managed to stand up or roll under a car, then bolt away, without making so much as a peep?.

There's a bunch of other shit that happens that I'm not going to recount here, but the entirety of Act III fundamentally hinges on Waingro wanting to get even with McCauley's crew. It's through Waingro that the plans for the Depository heist are discovered and leaked to Hanna, and it's out of a desire to kill Waingro that McCauley ultimately ends up delayed in his escape and shot dead by Hanna.

This is all basically fine, and I wouldn't really complain about it, were it not for one thing.

Who the fuck is Waingro?

Not like, who does the name refer to, I know that, but who is he as a person? What does he like, do? I have no fucking clue! He gets a grand total of like, five minutes of screentime, and three of them are spent killing random innocent people for the lulz! The entire plot pivots around him and his actions, yet he has no defining characteristics beyond "Likes Killing People" and no motivation beyond "Angy At McCauley". He's a walking deus ex machina who takes agency out of Hanna and Van Zant's hands and turns them into passengers in their own stories for the sake of short-circuiting the need for an actual plot where things happen.

I Pirated This Movie, and I Still Want a Refund

I really don't have anything more I can say than that. I'm not mad at it. It's not so bad it's good. It's not so good it's bad. It's just…not. It's lacking. Insubstantial. It's not even empty calories, because not only are the action scenes divided up by an hour of people talking about random pointless bullshit – which I would maybe care about if I was even a tiny bit invested in any of these people, but I'm just not – they're also just not that good. The Infinite Ammo trope is a mainstay, which makes everything feel weightless and make-believe, and there's just nothing to it except "guys shooting at other guys". A good action scene is so much more, but that's a topic for another day. Right now, I'm just let down.

Heat underwhelms me.