De Niro versus Pacino, in a 170-minute Los Angeles crime epic. Michael Mann's masterpiece and the bank-robbery template every subsequent heist film has been working off.
Neil McCauley runs a small, disciplined crew of professional armed robbers in Los Angeles. Vincent Hanna is a Robbery-Homicide lieutenant whose obsession with closing cases has cost him two marriages. McCauley's crew pulls an armoured car heist in the opening sequence. Hanna picks up the trail.
The two men spend the rest of the film moving toward each other across the city. They meet, once, in a diner — a five-minute scene of mutual professional recognition that became the most-discussed scene of its decade. The film closes with a bank robbery that goes wrong, a foot chase through downtown LA, and an airport runway. Heat does not deliver its catharsis cheaply.
The mid-film bank robbery sequence runs approximately twelve minutes. The shoot-out that follows is the most-imitated set piece in modern crime cinema. The U.S. military reportedly uses footage from it as training material for urban combat — the geography, the discipline, the way the crew moves under fire.
Mann insisted his actors train for months with retired SAS adviser Andy McNab. Robert De Niro had to be able to perform tactical reload drills under speed. The realism is the point. Most action films cut around the operational details; Heat lingers on them, and the result is a sequence in which the violence has weight because the technique has weight.
The famous coffee-shop sequence is the first and almost only scene in the film in which De Niro and Pacino share the screen. Hanna pulls McCauley over on the highway after surveilling him; they go to a diner together to talk. The conversation is professional, almost affectionate. McCauley explains his rule: 'Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.' Hanna replies that the rule is what's left him alone.
The scene is the film's argument: cop and criminal share more with each other than either does with civilians. Both men are professionals in trades that have hollowed them out. The film's tragedy is that they meet only twice, and the second time one of them shoots the other on the airport tarmac.
Heat is the foundational text of what's now called 'Mann's LA' — a particular nocturnal, glass-and-concrete, headlights-on-asphalt vision of the city that has been quoted by everything from Drive (2011) to Nightcrawler (2014) to True Detective Season 2. Mann shoots LA in long lenses, often at dusk, in compositions that emphasise the city's vastness and emptiness.
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti shot the film on a mix of film stocks and helicopter aerials. The result is a city that feels like the largest character in the cast. Most subsequent LA-set crime films have been arguing with Heat about how the city should look.