I meet up at least once a year with a group of university friends. We pick a city, descend on it and then leave 48 hours later, often a little worse for wear. I would say about 60% of all communication on these trips is quotes from Michael Mann’s 1995 heist thriller, Heat. Screaming like Al Pacino’s coked-up Los Angeles police detective Vincent Hanna or calmly saying “I have a woman” like Robert De Niro’s robotic master thief Neil McCauley if any of my friends ask me about my wife.
The comedian and film-maker Stanley Sievers did a skit about a guy whose life is destroyed because his whole personality is the film Heat. I laughed along with that awkwardly, while considering just how many times I said “the action is the juice” the last time I met up with my friends.
My social media algorithms know me well enough to feed me Heat content: a bumper sticker that reads “honk if you’ve seen Michael Mann’s critically acclaimed masterpiece Heat”, a comedian doing an impression of De Niro auditioning for Heat 2 by laughing maniacally, 30-year-old casting polaroids, action figures of the horrendous villain Waingro. It’s never-ending and it’s also never enough. I could watch this slop for hours.
So why do I spend so much time rewatching snippets of a film I’ve seen at least 50 times? Why is a neo-noir heist movie my feelgood film?
There’s the obvious: it’s arguably Mann’s most accomplished project. The central performances are electric. Pacino and De Niro play driven obsessives drawn to and repulsed by each other in equal measure. It looks incredible, as Mann turns Los Angeles into a world of cold austere chrome and glass or, as Mark Fisher put it, “endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises”. The film slots into a cinematic tradition: yes, Christopher Nolan borrowed heavily from Heat when he made The Dark Knight, but Mann used the climax of Bullitt and Monte Hellmann’s The Shooting for his deadly finale at LAX.
Weirdly, this cat-and-mouse tale of high stakes and heists is my cinematic comfort food. Every single time the opening highway robbery begins I lock in. It’s a masterful set piece: an ultra-violence chess match played out on the Los Angeles asphalt that’s often overshadowed by the thunderous shootout toward the end of the film. In between those two book ends are double crosses, domestic blowups, and a homoerotic bromance that makes Trump and Putin look like Baldwin v Buckley.
In a contemporary world which seems to be in constant flux, Heat is a steady state universe. It never disappoints and harks back to a world in the mid-1990s, which, despite being another era when American interventionist policies went dramatically awry, feels quaint compared to today. There’s a moral code that often is mercilessly harsh but remains consistent.
I’m hardly the only Heat obsessive out there. The Prince Charles Cinema in London is in the middle of a months-long run of showing the film; The Ringer’s Rewatchables podcast has deep dived into Heat three times; while the One Heat Minute podcast dissects the film on a granular level. French critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s excellent Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective book, which was translated into English for the first time last year, also gives Heaters even more to consider.
Despite so much being said about the film, I love the fact that there is always something new to focus on. For example, taking time to marvel at Val Kilmer, who delivers one of his best turns, including what the New York Times called “the movie’s most mesmerizing moment” – which turns out to be a “microscene” where he watches a clerk verify that his fake license is real. That sounds dull, but when you see the moment in question it is utterly compelling and in most other films wouldn’t be anywhere near as good. But Heat seems to operate on a different level.
Every bit part overdelivers: Henry Rollins as a meathead henchman, Hank Azaria as a horny mark, Tom Noonan scouring the pre-internet for scores, Jon Voight as an unflappable fixer in a bolo tie, Natalie Portman as a jilted teenager waiting for her Jungian archetype of a dad. Each one of these performances leaves you wanting more and hints at interior worlds we only see fragments of.
Perhaps that’s why it’s my feelgood film – the stories Mann creates linger so long after viewing, none more so than the tragic arc of Donald Breedan, the ex-con played by Dennis Haysbert who is trying to turn a clean slate but ends up working for the prickish restaurant owner (played to perfection by Bud Cort). When McCauley turns up in his cafe looking for a getaway driver, we all know he can’t turn him down.
His downfall is inevitable and brutal.
The scene sums up what Heat is for me: a story about sliding doors and second chances, about red lines that we draw for ourselves and then cross, futures we build and simultaneously destroy. Obsessions and their consequences, domesticity and the underworld, cops and robbers. Things that can’t coexist without conflict.
Heat 2’s rumoured cast list of Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Al Pacino, Austin Butler, Adam Driver, Ana de Armas, Jeremy Allen White, Bradley Cooper and Channing Tatum looks great on paper. But I have my reservations about going back to what is an almost-perfect film universe. You can have an equally starry cast and a director with half a dozen more films under his belt, but will that special alchemy happen again? If it doesn’t, I’m sure I’ll survive – there will always be the memes.
Heat is available on Hulu and Paramount+ in the US and Netflix and Disney+ in the UK and Australia
