Heat: Review By deadeyedick79

When looking back over a career in any profession, one tends to search for the watershed moment, the crescendo, the moment the wave breaks and splashes as far as it can up the shoreline. When were they at their absolute best. In most cases this is reserved for personal reflection, but in the case of movies, the subject of personal best is left up to the critics.

Relevance to its time and culture are offered up as keystones to how well the movie was recieved, while how important it is to our current times relate to how well it ages. Some movies define the former at the cost of the latter, as with 'Easy Rider', while some seem to get better with age, like 'Raging Bull'.

In the case of 'Heat', now over decade since its release, some movies don't seem to age at all. This movie should age like brushed stainless steel with its all-star cast all at top form, and a career cementing turn in the director's chair by Michael Mann. It has a sheen about it, a polish to it that makes it crisp viewing. The steely cold characters match their enviroment perfectly, even when human emotion is constantly brimming over the edges. This movie is truly a Mann's man movie. Uncompromising men of war who end up hollowed out or dead by the very things that kept them safe. As is the case of DeNiro, his fate was sealed by breaking his code of walking away when he feels the heat around the corner. A cold, calculating thief killed not by a gunshot, but by his warmth for a woman and need to honor a fellow soldier by avenging his death. Pacino's character perhaps was left with an even worse fate. In all the murk he mopped up, trying to protect his idea of society, family, and right and wrong, he found that society has, in fact, betrayed him, left him, not for another man, but for nothing. He's been betrayed for no reason other than just being himself. In devoting himself to ridding the world of the garbage and carnage he waded through every day, he ended up finding and killing the only person he felt close to. The only person he could relate to. It was DeNiro's hand he had in his hand at the end of the movie. Now tell me thats not sad.

This movie rocks on all the right levels, and never lets down. The pacing is deliberate and smart, the writing is bar none, and the action sequences explode off the screen like nothing you've ever seen. The shoot out at the close of the second act is unparalled, and even Mann himself could not top it again, although he tried with Miami Vice. This movie marks Mann's high mark. And when you stack his movies up, you'll see what a towering achievement this one really is. No filler here, this is the real deal.