Cool, calm and shuddering with machismo: Does Heat deserve its status as a heist classic?

The man lays down his gun and keys. He walks across to the window of his modernist, beachfront apartment and stands in the alcove, bathed in the pale blue light of dawn, looking out at the Pacific. He listens to the rolling of the waves as mournful, enigmatic music plays on the soundtrack. This is one of the definitive images from Michael Mann's blistering heist film Heat, a classic of Nineties cinema starring Robert De Niro as an existential loner and career thief. Everything in Heat is about calm and control. Even as fusillades of machine‐gun bullets ring out across LA streets, De Niro's Neil McCauley is composure itself.

It’s 25 years since it was released in the UK in the spring of 1996. The consensus then among British critics was that Mann had made an instant masterpiece. It was hailed as “the best American crime movie in over a decade", “a revelation” and “a film that is indisputably special”. But there was also a backlash from some spectators who felt that the film was all slick surface, no emotional depth. They had a point. The preening narcissism of Mann’s main characters is self-evident. There is no humour here and the portentousness can be hard to take.

What cannot be denied, though, is Mann’s chutzpah and his formal brilliance. In making Heat, the brash American filmmaker created a full-blown Wagnerian epic, or Californian version thereof, about subject matter normally tackled in Poverty Row B movies. In fact, Mann himself had directed a 1989 TV film called LA Takedown that told exactly the same story, but without stars like De Niro or Al Pacino and without the budget, stunts or gleaming cinematography. Nobody paid much attention. The TV film was seen as a mediocre west coast pastiche of Mann’s earlier television series Miami Vice. “Another stab at a Designer Cop Show", grumbled the LA Times, complaining about Mann’s clumsy attempts to blend stylised, Sam Peckinpah-like violence with New Age elements.  

For Mann, though, LA Takedown was a useful dry run. It was the equivalent of one of his gangster protagonists rehearsing step by step a robbery that he would later commit for real, or of a fighter sparring in advance of the big bout. Both LA Takedown and Heat share identical protagonists: the ultra-professional, workaholic cop pitting his wits against the ultra-professional, workaholic robber. The two men are near mirror reflections of one another.  

The casting was crucial to the success of Heat. Instead of journeymen actors like LA Takedown’s Scott Plank and Alex McArthur, Mann recruited the two most revered male stars of the era, De Niro and Al Pacino. A strong argument can be made that this was De Niro’s last truly great performance before his career tapered off into gurning, grinning self-parody and he began to do comedies like Meet the Fockers. De Niro is superb as the master thief, Neil McCauley: disciplined, focused and with an uncanny ability to melt into the crowd. Pacino is more flamboyant but equally striking as the cop, Vincent Hanna, tracking him down.  

“Do you recognise the MO [modus operandi]?” Pacino’s Hanna is asked by a fellow cop early on in the movie, when he visits the site of the first heist committed by De Niro’s crew. “MO… is that they’re good!” Pacino exclaims, marvelling at the slickness of his antagonists. He even admires the way they’ve killed all the witnesses on the grounds that if they’ve already murdered one of the guards, they might as well knock off the rest. “At a drop of a hat, these guys will rock and roll,” Pacino clicks his fingers approvingly. “Is this guy something or is he something!” Pacino later enthuses about De Niro, delighted to be pitted against somebody as single-minded, smart and cunning as himself.  

The cop and the master thief are heroic archetypes, very far removed from the harassed police officers and seedy, violent crooks generally found in heist movies. Both De Niro and Pacino wear designer suits and look as if they could have stepped off the cover of Esquire. They’re endlessly resilient and never panic, even in the most stressful situations. The LA they inhabit is a reflection of their personalities: full of shiny, modernist buildings and shimmering, fast-flowing freeways. Mann includes lots of high angle shots of cops staking out the thieves or vice versa and finds beauty in the most unlikely places. For example, in the middle of a heist, he will suddenly show strangely lyrical images of windscreens exploding one after another.  

There is, though, a contradiction at the heart of the movie. It strives to offer a nuanced and deeply layered portrait of two characters who are essentially ciphers. De Niro’s Neil remarks more than once that he won’t let himself get attached to “anything you’re not willing to walk out on, if you feel the heat around the corner, in 30 seconds flat”. Like a samurai or monk, he lives by an austere code. Pacino’s Hanna, meanwhile, is described by Mann in his notes on the screenplay as “a totally committed hunter” whose “focus is obsessive… he’s hooked on the morphine-groove high when he is on the hunt”.  

In the most famous scene in the movie, the pair meet for a fraternal coffee – one of the rare times the two heavyweight stars have shared meaningful screen time. “What the f*** is that? Barbecues and ball games?” De Niro sneers when Pacino asks if he has ever wanted a “regular life”. One of the main points of the film, though, is that they actually both do crave relationships and normality but are so busy committing and fighting crime that they have no time for wives, girlfriends or kids.    

The film weakens perceptibly whenever the men step out of their preordained roles. Pacino’s fraying marriage to Justine (Diane Venora) is sketched in cursory fashion. And he goes through the motions when dealing with the problems of his deeply troubled stepdaughter (a youthful Natalie Portman). Meanwhile, De Niro’s relationship with the graphic designer (Amy Brenneman) he meets by chance in a restaurant is handled in strangely sentimental fashion. We know that he will walk away from her in an instant the moment the “heat” is on him.  

Look too closely at Heat and the magic risks evaporating. The cop and the thief portrayed in such idealised fashion by Mann are both work-obsessed loners with disastrous, dysfunctional private lives. When it comes down to it, they only have eyes for each other. It’s debatable whether either is quite as skilled as he would like to think. When they become involved in a massive gun battle outside a bank in downtown LA, the streets are full of shoppers and kids, caught in the crossfire. For such professionals to put the public at risk in this way is reckless in the extreme.  

Even so, Heat is bravura filmmaking. Watching it again, you can’t help but marvel at its visual invention and the intensity of the storytelling. Mann’s attention to detail was such that he hired ex-SAS soldier Andy McNab to spend five months as technical weapons advisor and trainer with Pacino, De Niro and Val Kilmer (as De Niro’s trusted lieutenant and wingman, Chris). The director also brought his actors together with real-life LAPD detectives and gangsters so they could conduct close-up research. The film has a formidable supporting cast that includes Portman, Ashley Judd, Tom Sizemore, Henry Rollins, Danny Trejo, Jon Voight, Ted Levine and Hank Azaria. They may have only limited screen time but, as Mann put it, “everybody has dimensionality”.  

Mann’s trick was to give a very generic tale about cops and robbers a tragic grandeur and complexity. Every sequence is magnified or has a shuddering machismo. Whether it’s an explosive moment involving the film’s one truly loathsome character Waingro (Kevin Gage), a dinner between friends or even that famous coffee break, each scene, however trivial, is hyper-charged. Whenever a small nut comes into view, the director is guaranteed to use a sledgehammer to crack it.  

You can see the influence of Heat in Christopher Nolan’s work, notably in the bank heist that opens The Dark Knight (2008). However, it’s telling that few other directors have tried to make big budget, three-hour crime thrillers on anything like this scale. It would be simply far too daunting. Only filmmakers with the vision and hubris of Mann would consider it… and it took him two attempts to get it right. He is now said to be considering a Heat prequel but that surely would be a mountain too high even for him to climb.  

Heat is on MUBI from 5 February and is available on Amazon Prime