4K UHD Review: Michael Mann’s Heat Gets Ultimate Collector’s Edition

Michael Mann’s moody crime classic gets a definitive release in the UHD format.

HeatThe protagonists of Michael Mann’s universe have a sense of direction and an unyielding devotion to their chosen profession. “All I am is what I’m going after,” says the robbery homicide detective played by Al Pacino in Heat, though this line could easily be the mantra of Will Smith’s eponymous champion in Ali or Tom Cruise’s professional assassin in Collateral. That devotion and drive are the fuel that keeps them going, and provides a black-or-white moral compass in a world that remains mystifyingly gray.

But what comfort does that sense of direction provide when it leaves others behind in the disaster zone of a marriage or relationship? And what kind of a life is it when a man constantly tells those whom he professes to love, “I’ll come back, but there’s something I have to go take care of first”? Those are the questions posed by Heat, which uses the game of predator versus prey between expert thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and dogged cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) to vibrantly and explosively explore the theme of lone-wolf masculinity.

McCauley is introspective, self-contained in his “alone but not lonely” universe, a career criminal with a talent for big money scores. He has an allegiance and understanding with his crew but no room in his life for any lasting connection. As he says repeatedly, he refuses attachment to anything he’s unwilling to walk out on if he feels the heat around the corner.

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Hanna, on the other hand, is explosive and spontaneous. His interrogation of a suspect involves him bursting into song, musing whether the suspect fell in love last night, then shrieking, “Gimme all you got! Gimme all you got!” He’s hungry for the chase, working all hours of day and night while his third wife (Diane Venora) passes him “on the down-slope of a marriage.” De Niro may have the better role, a tragic protagonist whose moral values get pushed to their limit, but Pacino has all the best dialogue. To wit, “You could get killed walkin’ your doggie!” and “She’s got a great ass! When I think of asses—a woman’s ass—something comes out of me!” rank up there with Al’s most memorably fiesty line readings.

These men are devoted to their work above all else, and they’re okay with that. It’s a sentiment that’s very much in the tradition of American individualism (it’s no fluke that Mann previously adapted James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans). It feels good to be good at something. There’s something comforting about applying knowledge to the point where it becomes instinct, and if these guys weren’t cops or robbers we could admire them the way we do the mechanic who fixes our broken car. A person is attractive when they do what they like and do it well. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to live with, as Hanna and McCauley prove time and again, unless you happen to be working with them and speaking their language.

McCauley’s crew includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose marriage is on the rocks because of his gambling addiction, and Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), who has a family and kids but can’t resist the allure of pulling off whatever heist is being planned next: a bank, a vault, an armored car. These men would perhaps be loathsome if they weren’t so capable at their jobs and so devoted to watching each other’s backs. When in the act, they perform like nimble magicians, and when the act is interrupted by cops, they’re a tightly wound fighting unit. Their relationships are much closer to each other than to their actual families.

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But Hanna’s empathy lies with McCauley, offering the respect of one adversary against another. As the police close in on the master thief’s grand scheme, Heat follows parallel stories of pursuit and planning that play out in a highly romanticized vision of Los Angeles. Mann tells his story with an equally rigorous attention to the details of crime scenes, the mechanics of robberies, and even the inner workings of late-night diners and nightclubs that the characters frequent. Throughout the film’s immaculately framed and cooly lensed scenes, you may find yourself slowly coming to respect Hanna and McCauley, and identifying with the former perhaps more because he represents the ostensible good guy. You may even itch for the moment where these titans will inevitably meet, which occurs when Hanna pulls McCauley over on the street and casually asks, “Whattaya say I buy you a cuppa coffee?”

Heat’s centerpiece scene is perhaps the simplest that Mann has ever choreographed, for relying on simple over-the-shoulder shots and close-ups. Of course, the scene is doubly thrilling because it finds the slyly impetuous Pacino and contemplative De Niro at the peak of their powers: both men middle-aged and seasoned from impressive acting careers, both engaging with subtext that’s so thick that the scene seems to operate in a metaphysical realm.

The scene quickly achieves true greatness, partly, yes, because of Hanna and McCauley’s memorably quotable threats to one another, but mostly because of the way the two men grow surprisingly intimate while discussing their hopes and dreams. Hanna repeatedly dreams of all the victims of all the murders that he ever committed staring at him with “black eyeballs,” while McCauley has nightmares of drowning. The effect is disarming, perhaps because it gets to the root of what drives these men forward—not the fear of being alone, but the fear of abandoning control over their destinies, which, of course, are interlocked.

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Heat’s middle section features one of the most spectacular gun battles in the history of movies, where the palpable threat of perpetually whizzing bullets is accompanied by a forceful and highly detailed sound design. But the effect of this dramatic shoot-out is heightened by the intimate diner scene that came before, just as Homer’s The Iliad offered glimpses of humanity before armies collided. Thereafter, Heat transforms into a film about the inevitability of fate. At the end of the story, one of the two titans will be dead, but after they have played out their game there’s a stroke that will either be praised as brazen machismo or the tragedy of being an American isolationist: cop and killer lock hands as one of them dies.

Heat is told on an impressive epic scale, what with its plethora of highly dimensional main characters, doomed romantic subplots (most poignantly the one between McCauley and Amy Brenneman’s Eady, a graphic designer who causes his self-controlled emotional shell to crack wide open), and vividly sketched supporting players. Jon Voight essentially reprises his Runaway Train role, basing his character on criminal turned actor Eddie Bunker, while character actor Tom Noonan has a spectacular cameo as a wheelchair-bound crime guru. There’s also an anecdotal subplot about a convict (Dennis Haysbert) fresh out of prison who’s incidental to the McCaulay-Hanna narrative until one crucial moment where he’s asked a typical Michael Mann question: “Are you in? Right now? Yes or no?”

Mann is always whipping up such confrontations, where characters have to make decisions on a dime, relying only on their intuitions and gut feelings. Life doesn’t always work that way, and often those life-changing events occur with barely perceptible slowness, but drama and poetry—which is to say, the stuff of artifice—is intended to bring moral questions to the fore. When the films are good, they allow us the opportunity to reflect back on our own lives and values. The cop-versus-robber narrative, frequently existing for vicarious thrills and shoot-‘em-up catharsis, here puts us into a place of wonderment: jobs versus families, risks versus sure things, support versus self-preservation. The characters in Heat aren’t so one-dimensional that they only choose one or the other, but they do make choices. And to those unwilling to commit, Vincent Hanna unconditionally roars, “Don’t you waste my motherfucking time!”

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Image/Sound

This UHD derives from the same remaster used for the 2018 Blu-ray, though the benefits of higher definition and HDR enhance the transfer’s already considerable attributes. Dante Spinotti’s gray-hued daytime cinematography now pops with an added gun-metal sheen, and the film’s darker scenes find a fairly significant boost in sharpness and clarity. Day-for-night exteriors pop with more pronounced grades of royal and navy blues, while interiors reveal additional contrast between yellow lighting and shadows at the margins of the frame. No new audio mix has been prepared for this release, but the 5.1 mix used on the previous Blu-ray is still reference-quality, whether elegantly mixing in the moody score amid softly spoken dialogue exchanges or erupting across all channels during the centerpiece firefight.

Extras

On his detailed commentary track, Michael Mann discusses the script’s development with real-life police detectives and professional thieves, the “causality” of his dramatic narrative, his work with the who’s who of great actors in the cast (he even offers a few choice anecdotes about Jon Voight’s initial resistance to taking the role of Nate), and more. While you may wish that this release included scenes from L.A. Takedown, the TV movie that Mann directed years earlier and served as a prototype for Heat, the three background documentaries featuring interviews with cast, crew, and consultants are richly contextual. “Pacino and De Niro: The Conversation” offers a nice glimpse into Pacino and De Niro’s masterful process, though you have to wade through some of the usual “he’s so giving” actor-speak. Also included are three theatrical trailers and several bland deleted scenes that rightfully belong on the cutting room floor. Finally, the release ports over the two filmmaker panels that appeared on the prior “Director’s Definitive Edition” Blu-ray. The most notable of the two is the one moderated by filmmaker Christopher Nolan and features Mann joined by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, all of whom offer varying and vivid perspectives on the making of the film.

Overall

Michael Mann’s moody crime classic gets a definitive release in the UHD format.

Score: 
 Cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi, Ted Levine, Dennis Haysbert, William Fichtner, Natalie Portman, Tom Noonan, Jon Voight  Director: Michael Mann  Screenwriter: Michael Mann  Distributor: 20th Century Studios Home Entertainment  Running Time: 170 min  Rating: R  Year: 1995  Release Date: August 9, 2022  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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