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Details: 2013, USA, Cert 15, 117 mins
Direction: Paul Feig
Genre: Comedy / Crime
Summary: Two woman cops with wildy different characters are forced to partner up to bring down a drug lord.
With: Demián Bichir , Demian Bichir , Marlon Wayans , Melissa McCarthy , Michael Rapaport and Sandra Bullock
Our reviews
Philip french.
Two mismatched FBI agents tackle a drug lord in this witless comedy, says Philip French
Catherine Shoard
The comedy formerly known as Untitled Female Buddy Cop Movie lives up to its title, writes Catherine Shoard
User reviews
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There is a sequence at the center of Michael Mann's "Heat" that illuminates the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna ( Al Pacino ) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley ( Robert De Niro ) for days. McCauley is smart and wary and seems impossible to trap. So, one evening, tailing McCauley's car, Hanna turns on the flashers and pulls him over.
McCauley carefully shifts the loaded gun he is carrying. He waits in his car. Hanna approaches it and says, "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?" McCauley says that sounds like a good idea.
The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.
McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a 'Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't. The conversation comes to an end. The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.
They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.
The movie's other subject is the women. Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice ( Diane Venora ), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis ( Val Kilmer ), whose wife is Charlene ( Ashley Judd ).
McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady ( Amy Brenneman ), who asks him a lot of questions. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely. "I am alone," he tells her. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her.
This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.
McCauley is the mastermind. Hanna is the guy assigned to guess his next move.
The cops keep McCauley and his crew under 24-hour surveillance, and one day follow them to an isolated warehouse area, where the thieves stand in the middle of a vast space and McCauley outlines some plan to them. Later, the cops stand in the same place, trying to figure out what plan the thieves could possibly have had in mind. No target is anywhere in view. Suddenly Hanna gets it: "You know what they're looking at? They're looking at us - the LAPD. We just got made." He is right. McCauley is now on a roof looking at them through a lens, having smoked out his tail.
De Niro and Pacino, veterans of so many great films in the crime genre, have by now spent more time playing cops and thieves than most cops and thieves have. There is always talk about how actors study people to base their characters on. At this point in their careers, if Pacino and De Niro go out to study a cop or a robber, it's likely their subject will have modeled himself on their performances in old movies. There is absolute precision of effect here, the feeling of roles assumed instinctively.
What is interesting is the way Mann tests these roles with the women. The wives and girlfriends in this movie are always, in a sense, standing at the kitchen door, calling to the boys to come in from their play. Pacino's wife, played by Venora with a smart bitterness, is the most unforgiving: She is married to a man who brings corpses into bed with him in his dreams. Her daughter, rebellious and screwed up, is getting no fathering from him. Their marriage is a joke, and when he catches her with another man, she accurately says he forced her to demean herself.
The other women, played by Judd and Brenneman, are not quite so insightful. They still have some delusions, although Brenneman, who plays a graphic artist, balks as any modern woman would when this strange, secretive man expects her to leave her drawing boards and her computer and follow him to uncertainty in New Zealand.
Michael Mann's writing and direction elevate this material.
It's not just an action picture. Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate - to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Heat (1995)
Rated R For Violence and Language
174 minutes
Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley
Jon Voight as Nate
Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna
Val Kilmer as Chris Shiherlis
Produced, Written and Directed by
- Michael Mann
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Heat Review
. A tantalising prospect in itself. That Michael Mann's film is an extraordinarily intelligent, stylish, violent, realistic study of moral decay and human nature in the City Of Angels, makes it doubly important. Heat proves one thing absolute. If you put great actors in a great script with a great visionary director in control, then you get a great movie. It's as simple as that.</p><p>Mann, as writer, has concocted a duel. On one side the cop, Vincent Hannah (Pacino), the dogged hunter prone to bursts of unwieldy emotion, possessing a sixth sense at second guessing his prey. His foe, the robber, is Neil McCauley (De Niro), icy cool, rational, brilliant, psychotic head of a gang of heist-kings equipped with automatic weapons and never-say-die obsessions. The battleground is a LA shorn of glamour. This is a moody, expansive cityscape, shot in earthy pastels, a twilight world of twisted morals, crumbling relationships, and dying dreams. Compared to your average studio movie it could be the surface of the moon. The film's sense of environment is peerless.</p><p>As Hannah and his crew of besuited cops close in, McCauley and his crew - an impressively edgy Kilmer, and reliable class from Tom Sizemore - plan the big score, taking a downtown bank under the very eyes of police surveillance. What lifts this beyond being yet another crime thriller, is Mann's dedication to creating inner-life for all the characters. The film flits between a maze of credibly defunct relationships: Pacino in an imploding marriage (to Diane Verona), De Niro falling for the quiet Amy Brenneman, Kilmer's volatile marriage to Ashley Judd... these characters have dimension. There is a genuine sense of loss for those who die, and understanding for those who strive.</p><p>Mann, who induced mood aplenty with Manhunter and visceral action with Last Of The Mohicans, here amalgamates his fetishes. Heat spills sobriety of feeling before (enhanced by the sleek synthesised score) erupting in moments of nerve jangling action. The bank job, true to form, goes haywire, resulting in a ferocious, thumpingly loud gun battle more Beruit CNN-style.</p><p>Pacino and De Niro are shapeshifters extraordinare, and they strike admirably different courses through the film (De Niro's vulnerable mastermind is the winner by a hand) and although they only meet twice in the film, the scenes are crucial and hair-tinglingly charged. And the huge support cast - including a transformed Jon Voight - fill the overabundance of subplots with shape and colour. There is too much going on, for too long, but by the end everything slots neatly into place, and the parting shot carries a cool poignancy that hovers in the mind for days.</p><p>Buy now on Amazon.</p><h2>Related Articles</h2><p><center><img style= "heat movie review guardian")
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Michael Mann's masterpiece is a three-hour crime epic, a love/hate letter the city of Los Angeles, a scathing Balzacian view of a society
I'm talking about Al Pacino and Robert de Niro, of course, and that sublime, cockamamie moment in Heat where they have a cup of coffee
Any misgivings about terseness at a Q&A panel dedicated to Heat, a film in which men prefer to let their automatic rifles talk about their
Specifically, I'm Robert De Niro as existential anti-hero Neil McCauley in Michael Mann's Heat. Devilishly handsome in his razor-sharp goatee
Yet like every other buddy cop film, The Heat ultimately stands or falls on the strength of its script and its cast. And this is the real reason
Heat (1995) · Details: 1995, USA, Cert 15, 170 mins. Direction: Michael Mann. Genre: Crime / Drama. Summary: A master cop and a master criminal, played by two
A modern masterpiece. Yes that is a cliché, but this film intergrates the complex issues of morality and the developing relationship between De Niro and Pacino
Summary: Two woman cops with wildy different characters are forced to partner up to bring down a drug lord. With: Demián Bichir, Demian Bichir, Marlon Wayans
HEAT is in my Top 20 ... Pacino & DeNiro are truly outstanding. Such a strong and believable film, and you get to live it move-by-move. In the
That Michael Mann's film is an extraordinarily intelligent, stylish, violent, realistic study of moral decay and human nature in the City Of Angels, makes it