Heat

James Fontanetta

Robert Deniro and Al Pacino head a star studded cast (including Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, Ashley Judd, Tom Sizemore) which has some brilliant dialogue throughout, but an unrealistic ending.

While both Deniro (playing a young Vito Corleone) and Pacino (reprising his role as Michael Corleone) starred in the "The Godfather Part 2", they didn't appear in any scenes together so you can say that this is their first time together (if only for a short time).

Their only real dialogue is a sequence at the center of the movie that clarifies the movie's real subject. As it begins, a Los Angeles police detective named Hanna (Pacino) has been tracking a high-level thief named McCauley (Deniro) 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 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-seeking 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 the moviw, 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.

Beyond that, Heat is anti-climatic.
by:  James Fontanetta