It's just two guys in nice suits, sitting across from each other at a restaurant, enjoying a cup of coffee. One of them happens to be a criminal on the verge of pulling one final big score. The other is a cop from the LAPD's Major Crime Unit (we'd call it the MCU, but we believe that acronym has now been colonized) who's hunting him. Both run tight crews. Both are extremely proficient at what they do, and take an enormous amount of pride in their professionalism and their apex-predator status. If you happen to be sitting at a table or two away from them, you'd assume the conversation was casual. Listen closely to their shop talk, their take on relationships, their recounting of dreams that sound a lot like nightmares, and you can hear the menace right below the surface. Everything's cordial over a cup of joe. Should these guys meet on the field of battle, however, they will not hesitate. Brother, one of them is going down.
As anyone who knows the backstory of Michael Mann's Heat — and at this point, his 1995 thriller about living and dying in LA has it's own special branch of film-history scholars and rabbit-hole fanboys — is aware, the movie's centerpiece has a real-life equivalent. Once upon a time in Chicago, the city the writer-director hailed from, a detective named Chuck Adamson ran into a big-time thief named Neil McCauley in a strip mall parking lot. Their natural instinct was to pull pistols. Someone was going to end up on a slab. Instead, they went to a nearby deli and got coffee.
“Charlie had great admiration for Neil as a thief, because he was very professional, very disciplined, and very, very smart,” Mann told us around the movie's 20th anniversary. “It's kind of like a rock climber having admiration for a very difficult rock face he's going to scale: The challenge of the course is what you admire.”
This anecdote was, by the filmmaker's own admission, the starting point for what would become Heat; Mann heard it straight from Adamson's mouth around 1980, and worked on variations of a script for over a decade. The cop friend of Mann's became Vincent Hanna, a name that first shows up in LA Takedown, the 1989 TV-movie that served as a dry run for what Mann wanted to accomplish with this story. Neil McCauley remained Neil McCauley. The restaurant scene, as it's now known, would have been legendary on its own for the simple fact that it finally gave Al Pacino and Robert De Niro the chance to share tough-guy talk and the same frame for the first time. But that still doesn't fully explain what happened next.
Which was the fact that Heat went from being a prestigious 1990s crime thriller that paired two 1970s New Hollywood stars to something else entirely. It began life as a film that impressed critics, barely made back its $60 million budget in the US (though it did twice that in terms of its overseas box office, where Mann was already considered a top-tier auteur), and didn't even crack the Top 20 in terms of the year's highest-grossing pictures. That last stat probably has something to do with the fact that it didn't go into wide release until Dec. 15, 1995, but still.
Fast-forward to now, and Heat is considered not just the top-dog crime thriller of that decade, but one of the great American movies of the past three decades, spoken of with the sort of reverence usually reserved for The Godfather or Chinatown or Lawrence of Arabia. It isn't Michael Mann's most financially successful movie, his most celebrated in terms of awards nominations, his most expensive, his most extravagant or, when you consider his filmography includes The Insider, arguably his best. (Again: arguably. Don't @ us.) Yet Heat is Mann's best-known work, the title that will immediately follow his name in his obit's headline. Its quotable lines are practically lingua franca and its fans are legion. How did this film go from prestigious tough-guy cult film to a modern classic that's first-ballot canon fodder?
Part of the level-up comes from its above-the-title leads, naturally, and how their careers have waxed and waned over the proceeding years. In 1995, Pacino had gone through several career trajectories, from star of The Godfather to Hollywood pariah after the failure of Revolution (1985), then a comeback success story, an Oscar winner (1992's Scent of a Woman), and someone with a reputation for not just going HAM but seriously hamming it up (1992's Scent of a Woman). De Niro was still synonymous with total-immersion acting, and was already beginning to diversify his portfolio with investments in Tribeca businesses, which would eventually lead to a number of questionable choices in terms of projects with big payouts.
But both were still considered icons of a certain type of filmmaking, which was already seen as a relic of yesteryear yet had never stopped being lionized as part of a Golden Age for gutsy, realistic, often violent but always substantial movies. Pacino had his work with Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon). De Niro had his work with Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas). Both had been in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II, but never in the same scene. And while Michael Mann's sleek, super-stylish aesthetic was more associated with Eighties flash than Seventies grit, the promise of a face-off between them suggested the possibility of something unique, if not a solution to playground-style arguments over who would win in a clash of Super Intense New York Actor titans.
To say the payoff more than lived up to the promise… well, rewatch that clip above. It's Ali vs. Frazier, Borg vs. McEnroe, the immovable object vs. the irresistible force. And while both actors had great work ahead of them — Jackie Brown, The Insider, The Irishman, Angels in Americaand Killers of the Flower Moon still lay on the horizon — Heat now clearly stands as a respective high point for their careers since 1995. De Niro's ability to play the Zen king of the concrete-and-steel jungle, especially one who could go from zero to psychopathic in a millisecond, was never put to better use. Ditto Pacino's dynamic way of playing both sides of the high-low scale. There's certainly a good deal of his “Shouty Al” histrionics on display, notably this priceless bug-eyed improvisation. But his performance is equal parts quiet and loud, unnervingly calm and off-the-charts manic. It's everything these guys do best, in roles that emphasize their strengths, guided by a director who knows how to utilize them and inspire them. If you think it's that easy, we can only counter with: When's the last time you watched this?
The idea of these two particular actors taking on the sort of existential tough guys normally associated with Japanese samurai, The Samuraiand bygone eras of genre films has only made this film age better than its peers. So has its peerless ensemble of supporting players: Was Val Kilmer's chilly way of deadening his expressions, or Tom Sizemore's Cro-Mag brutishness, or Diane Venora's jungle-cat wariness ever out to better use? Has there been a scuzzier fuck-up you wanted to see get knocked against a diner window more than Kevin Gage's Waingro? The bench is leagues deep here, with a dugout roster that includes Mykelti Williamson, Amy Brenneman, Wes Studi, Dennis Haysbert, Ashley Judd, Tom Noonan, and a pre-WTF-happened Jon Voight doing first work in the margins and on the sidelines. Everyone has their reasons. Everyone matters here whenever they're in the frame.
Pacino with Mann on set.
©Warner Bros/Everett Collection
A lot of that comes directly from Mann and his particular priorities. It's not just that his stylized take on the crime movie has proven that a mix of lowbrow pulp fiction given the high-gloss treatment would be particularly influential in the years to come; there's a reason that everything from The Dark Knight to the wave of faux-Heat movies like Den of Thieves (2018) would pay homage slash rip it off shamelessly throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. What makes this such an all-around feast for the cast is his ambitious way of peppering it with peripheral bits of storytelling that, in other hands, would feel like filler, but are just important to Mann as that bravura battle of ballistics on the streets of Los Angeles. On the surface, there's no real reason that Dennis Haysbert's wheelman Breedan should have not one but two scenes with his wife, played by Kim Staunton, discussing how tough things are. Or that, having already established Waingro as psycho killer, we need to bear witness to the aftermath of him killing a porstitute. Or that the subplot involving a very young Natalie Portman dealing with mental-health issues should be there at all.
Yet the writer-director ensures both of these bits of side business feel not just essential but somehow vital. Mann is not crafting a movie about cops and robbers. In his eyes, he's crafting an epic tapestry of crime, class and capitalism that, at it's core, is about people. The humanity's the juice for him, and that makes all the difference. As does Mann's ability to somehow take this sprawling, near-three-hour narrative and make it feel not just compact but hard as a diamond. He'd try to juggle tone and interweaving stories, formalism and feeling, the superficial pleasures of a crime movie and the philosophical heft of what professionalism means to men and women (largely men) over the next 30 years, with varying degrees of success. But Mann hasn't found the perfect mixture of pulp, personal obsessiveness, and the procedural template the way he did with this.
Add in that what passes for “big” movies now are just loud and disposable spectacles, or serialized stories that aren't worth the sum of their parts as a whole, and of course Heat keeps rising and rising in estimation over the years. Its ability to surf Generation X's overall nostalgia for the pre-Internet Nineties while also resonating with dazzle-addicted film bros and the grindset contingent is downright impressive. (So much of Heat's fixation on monastic rigor, myopic dedication to a principle, and being able to walk away from anything in 30 seconds flat sometimes feels like its predicting the whole sigma-lion thing to an uncanny degree.) The more the era of enshittification infects mass entertainment, the more Heat feels like a unicorn. You can't make crime movies like this anymore, even if you wanted to. You can't make a movie like this anymore, period.
We wanted to give the last word about how and why Heat is worthy of being considered a modern classic, however, to a superfan. Blake Howard was a teenager living in Sydney, Australia, when he first saw Heat “on a pirated pan-and-scan VHS tape.” He eventually started a podcast called One Heat Minute, which devoted one episode to every minute of the movie. (Full disclosure: Howard has had me on as a guest.) For the finale, Mann himself talked to Howard on the show. “He had two main comments about the podcast itself,” the host recalls. “One was: 'I compliment your obsessions.' And the other was that I was completely fucking insane.”
When we asked Howard why he thought, 30 years after its release, Heat is now recognized as a landmark of American moviemaking, he talked about the direction, the performances, the quality of the writing and the way genre films are looked at less as termite art and more like just plain art. All the usual suspects. Then he remembered what it was like when he started the podcast almost a decade ago.
“THE [would get] two reactions when I asked people to come on,” Howard says. “One was curiosity. The other was, 'Hmm.' But what resonated in the show was this electricity of people going, 'Oh, I love that movie.' Like they finally had permission to say it out loud: 'I love Heat.' And I think what became apparent to me doing the show is that second for second, minute for minute, across the 166 pre-credits running time — the more you rewatch the movie, the more rewatchable it becomes somehow. I think that we've just had enough time to appreciate it. You know, time is luck, as Michael Mann says. And time is luck with Heat.“
