It’s been a running joke for several years between me and my Flickcharter friend Nigel that I’ve never seen Heat, which is one of his favorite movies. I knew he’d assign it to me for this challenge, and sure enough, he did. To be honest, I probably would’ve watched it sooner otherwise, but I was happy to save it for his challenge week.
I won’t lie, I did a bit of a double-take when I saw this crime flick was almost 3 hours long – I even posted on Twitter asking if that was really necessary. The consensus: Yes, it is. Well, I’m not WHOLLY convinced, but my opinion is partially colored by the tendency of slow burn films to edge me into drowsy territory these days (my fault, not the film’s, but it still isn’t what I’d consider fun). And yes, this is a slow burn. It’s a crime film, but it’s very character driven, and contains a lot of scenes that aren’t strictly necessary from a plot point of view, but since the plot isn’t necessarily the main point, it’s hard to argue against them.
The overall plot is fairly simple – career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his crew get on the radar of hard-nosed homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), and they play cat and mouse through the rest of the film. It’s complicated, though, by the sheer number of other characters (many of them with pretty well-developed arcs of their own) and subplots – crew member Chris (Val Kilmer) and his wife’s troubles, Neil’s new relationship, Vincent’s failing marriage and troubled stepdaughter, conniving former crew member Waingro, victim/antagonist Van Zant, etc. All of this is understandably a bit hard to keep track of when you’re fighting sleep, so I wisely took a sabbatical and the second half of the film benefited from that greatly.
