There were friends of mine in high school who swore by Heat (1995).  I did not see it until today, so whenever they talked about it, I could not speak my opinion on the matter.  Often when your peers, especially at that age, discuss things they like, then you try them out for yourself.  You know, peer pressure.  Luckily, I never hung around the kind of people who drank or did drugs.  My friends were on the Academic Quiz Bowl Team (for which I received a varsity letter) and the Armchair Strategists Club.  We talked about movies, too, but I always took Heat for another one of those gangster films of which I was never fond.  Today’s movie has some of those elements, especially in terms of its length and the fact that it stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.  I mean, come on, what else could it be with those two in it.  While it is a little different, it is still not all that appealing to me.

The first of the stars we meet in Heat is De Niro, who plays a criminal mastermind named Neil McCauley.  He has a crew of people with which he works, though there is one new face: Waingro (Kevin Gage).  The other two, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), are long-time companions and have a code for how they operate.  It is after they steal bearer bonds from an armored truck that their problems begin.  This is because Waingro decides to murder one of the truck’s guards, forcing them to kill the rest so that there are no witnesses.  Later, once they have gotten away, Neil is about to kill Waingro for causing extra problems, but Waingro escapes as a police vehicle speeds past them.  Meanwhile, their escapades have brought the attention of law enforcement, namely Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).  The one witness they have to the crime gives Lieutenant Hanna his first lead: that one of the assailants referred to another as “Slick.”  Lieutenant Hanna takes this information to some of his informants, and soon he has Michael’s name.  It does not take the LAPD long to set up around-the-clock surveillance on Chris, Michael, and Neil.  As for the thieves, they make arrangements with Roger Van Zant (William Fichtner), the owner of the bearer bonds, for their return.  However, instead of handing them over for the agreed upon total, Roger sends men to kill Neil and his group.  They are, understandably, perturbed.  At the same time, there are other heists to perform, the next of these being a bank job.  The night of this robbery, the LAPD is watching as Chris, Michael, and Neil break into their target building.  Unfortunately, one of the officers watching this unfold makes a noise, spooking Neil.  It is enough to where he tells the others they need to leave immediately, which they do without taking anything with them.  Lieutenant Hanna has to watch them drive away because they have not stolen anything.  For Neil, this is enough for him to urge the others that they need to go their separate directions.  Chris objects, saying that the take is too big for them to pass.  When Michael backs up Chris, Neil goes along with it.  They also turn their knowledge of their being watched to their advantage, throwing the LAPD off their scent at every turn.  The problem is that Waingro is still at large.  After all their careful planning, on the day they are to hold up the bank, their usual driver, Gilbert Trejo (Danny Trejo), backs out citing the level of attention they have drawn from the police.  In actuality, he had been threatened by Waingro, who is now working for Roger, to set up Neil and the others.  The betrayal also involves the cops, who show up outside the bank as the robbers are entering their getaway car.  Instead, Chris opens fire on law enforcement, and there ensues a nightmarish shoot-out between Neil’s guys and Lieutenant Hanna’s officers.  In the process, Michael is killed and Chris is severely wounded.  Chris and Neil manage to escape, taking Chris to a friendly doctor that they pay with their ill-gotten cash.  While Chris recuperates, Neil goes on to find those responsible.  His first thought is Gilbert since he had been the one not present during the burglary.  Going to his place, Neil finds Gilbert on the verge of death.  Before he passes, he reveals that it had been Roger, with Waingro’s help, to betray their target to the LAPD.  The person Neil really wants is Waingro, though he is holed up in a hotel outside of the airport.  Lieutenant Hanna hopes to put this information out into the streets in order to lure Neil to this location.  Though Neil eventually gets what he needs to exit the country and never look back, something he has talked about doing through the movie, he instead heads to the same hotel to execute Waingro.  Having accomplished this, he goes to return to his car but sees Lieutenant Hanna coming after him.  Instead, in the chaos of the fire alarm Neil pulls, he takes off running.  Lieutenant Hanna catches up with him, and there are some tense moments in the field alongside where planes are landing at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).  As extra lights come on just before one just touches down, Lieutenant Hanna spots Neil’s shadows and kills his adversary.  Neil shares some last words with Lieutenant Hanna about being right as to not ever going back to jail, and the film ends.

There are some pretty significant aspects of Heat that I left out because I wanted to save them for this paragraph.  The title, by the way, refers to the attention that criminals receive when the authorities appear wise to their machinations.  That is what a slang dictionary would tell you, anyway.  Instead, the film seems to want to show that it applies to most of the major characters and their personal lives.  It is summed up best with Neil’s credo about never being attached to anything that cannot be left behind in thirty seconds or less.  He explains this to Lieutenant Hanna at one point when they get coffee, the result of the cop trying to convince the criminal to quit.  In response, Lieutenant Hanna asks Neil if the thief is a monk.  There is some irony in this question as Lieutenant Hanna is no less dedicated to his own work.  It results in the estrangement of his wife, Justine (Diane Venora), and step-daughter Lauren Gustafson (Natalie Portman).  It almost turns to tragedy with Lauren when she is found half-dead by Lieutenant Hanna in his bathtub, the result of an attempted suicide.  For Neil, we see his principle in action when he leaves Eady (Amy Brenneman) behind at the end, a woman to whom he had grown close.  People like Lieutenant Hanna and Neil alienate others because they feel it is safer.  God sees it differently.  Matthew 18:20 says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  While one could hardly say that Neil and his accomplices get together in God’s name, the passage pertains to the fact that God is love.  It is not complicated.  This is also why Lieutenant Hanna accusing Neil of being a monk caught my attention.  He did so because there is the stereotype that male religious are solitary creatures.  Like any stereotype, this is the result of a lack of understanding of the religious life.  There are some monks and nuns that live as hermits.  At the same time a documentary I saw recently reminded me of that in this situation, too, God is with them.

I wish God were more a part of Heat.  Another factor it shares with those gangster movies I mentioned at the beginning for me on a personal level is not having any characters to which I could relate.  The film tries by showing everyone having separate families.  This did spark a bit of sympathy for me.  It all faded as I watched them shoot indiscriminately during their botched bank heist.  At one point, Michael picks up a little girl to use as a human shield.  I guess I can take solace in the fact that most of them, save for Chris, end up paying for their crimes.  Also, Lieutenant Hanna does save Lauren.  There are not enough of those moments in this film for me to recommend it.