Heat

Awwww. I was disappointed by this movie. Very disappointed. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. You’d think it would be an awesome film but it just didn’t click with me. Well, I only started to really get into it 2 hours into the movie which is never a good thing. I don’t know exactly what it was but I found myself a little bored and not caring about any characters for 2 hours. Then, it was only during the last 50 minutes that I started to get excited and care about the characters.

Pacino is the cop, De Niro is the ‘bad man’ and him and a group of other guys rob stuff. That’s pretty much the plotline.

I saw the opening titles and there’s Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Hank Azaria and Natalie Portman. I got really excited!!

De Niro’s ‘gang’ are at this café place and they couldn’t be more suspicious looking if they tried. This is one of the reasons I didn’t get into this.

It was interesting to have the opener to the characters be their job and therefore that’s our first impression, and then see their private lives [especially with the women in their lives]. Pacino’s wife doesn’t appriciate him and constantly complains about him doing his freaking job! I hate it when women are like that! Its their job! They need it to help us keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Then Val Kilmer [before he lost his acting ability and gained weight] has wife troubles too because he has a ‘gambling problem’. De Niro tells everyone to not get attached to people because you need to be able to just run and drop everything. However, he breaks this when an adorable bookworm woman takes an interest in him.

I’ve read that the Pacino/De Niro café scene is a great scene and it was because they’re both phenomenal actors but the scene was overrun with hair dye.

My first spark of emotion was about the 1hr50min mark. We’d seen this black guy doing community service even though he clearly doesn’t want to. But he does it to make his girlfriend proud. He knows he’s done wrong and is trying to change for her and she appreciates it. So, when De Niro comes into the kitchen where he’s doing the community service and asks him to be their get-a-way driver, I was like “nooo!!! Don’t do it!! You’ve come so far!! Think of your future and your girlfriend! Don’t let her down!” But he agrees and gets killed and its like “dumbass.”

The shooting scene is legendary too, probably because it manages to go on for so long and not get boring or repetitive. And its very loud. My ears are still hurting [had headphones on, everyone else is sleeping. Well, my parents are, dunno about Tom…]! But Pacino shoots this guy who has a kid in his arms and you hold your breath and he hits him and Pacino lets out a sigh of relief and so did I as the kid survived.

It was sad because Kilmer’s wife didn’t know what the audience knew; that Kilmer couldn’t live without her “for me the sun rises and sets with her, man.” It looks like Kilmer’s wife is going to go along with setting up the trap to hand him into the authorities. BUT! He’s cut his hair off! He clearly looks like he’s dying but he’s driven to her. She looks down at him from the balcony and he smiles at her with such a loving smile. She knows he loves her. She signals for him to leave with the smallest gesture but he gets it completely. Its probably one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. Weird, right? But it was all done via their faces and their knowledge of one another. Quite beautiful.

Natalie Portman plays Pacino’s stepdaughter and she’s pretty messed up because her mum doesn’t really pay attention to her and her dad always forgets her. She tries to kill herself and her mum sees her all cut up and looking like death. It must be absolutely horrible seeing your child like that.

The last scene, Pacino VS De Niro is rather tense. De Niro is shot but Pacino holds his hand, like brotherly love. It’s a very sweet and quite powerful image to end on. It says so many things and, I guess, can viewed in different ways depending on the person. I saw it as they understood each other and that they both would have been gutted if the other had been killed. Nice ending.

I can’t see how this got into Empire’s Top 500 films ever at 48. It just looks like a long version of CSI or some other cop show, just with much better actors. Not my cup of tea, I guess.

185/212

Kate
xoxo