Thanks, I Hate It: Michael Mann's 'HEAT'

I love Manhunter. Mann’s Red Dragon adaptation is smart, taut, empathetic, and stars the electrifying William Petersen, one of Hollywood’s great could-have-beens. The whole thing is so insightfully tense, not a moment or expression wasted. Then there’s Heat. It’s tough to express how boring and devoid of psychological insight this movie is, even before you get into Mann’s total disinterest in its women. Al Pacino plays an L.A. cop whose devotion to his career has destroyed his marriage opposite Robert de Niro as a thief whose devotion to his has prevented him from ever settling down. There’s a cool gunfight on a surface street, I guess, but aside from that it’s wall-to-wall stoic men sublimating their repressed emotions into a battle of wills.

Here’s the problem with Heat. For loss to mean something, we’ve got to feel the stakes. The women and families in Heat are cardboard cutouts, holes in the shape of abstract ideas like “wife” and “child.” How can we be expected to care about someone ignored by the film itself? Why does one man’s detachment matter in a fictional world where detachment is all we experience? Heat tries to make its action scenes and the tension between its protagonists its dramatic foundation, but it’s skipping work in doing so. For action to mean anything, it has to be grounded in emotion. 

But even with all its missteps and flatness and dull, edgy masculine bunk, what I really hate about Heat is Al Pacino. I can understand why directors lean into his ability to look tired, with his eye bags and his hangdog expression, but my God, there’s nothing to it! He just doesn’t have whatever magical ability lets actors like Jeff Bridges and James Gandolfini slip believably into burnout. With Pacino it’s just like staring at a Muppet without an arm in it. de Niro’s got no edge in this movie either. If I wanted to watch two middle-aged men trade barbs about emotionally distancing themselves from their lives, I’d go to my family’s Christmas party.