For episode 8 we finally sat down together with Heat, Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic, and walked away with our first matching perfect score in a while. Matt grew up on this one, but mostly through broadcast TV edits, and found pieces of the famous coffee-shop scene between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino he'd never actually seen before. Jeff came in less familiar, and left most struck by the cast list top to bottom: Pacino, De Niro, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight, Dennis Haysbert, Jeremy Piven, and Wes Studi.
De Niro plays Neil McCauley, who runs a crew of professional thieves; Pacino is Vincent Hanna, the detective chasing him down after an armored-car robbery goes wrong. What drives both of our scores is the same thing the movie is named for: McCauley's code, the idea that he's never built an attachment he isn't willing to walk away from in thirty seconds. Matt spent a lot of the discussion on whether McCauley actually lives by that rule or just believes he does. The crew's early decisions, a hired hand brought on, a batch of stolen bonds, end up driving the entire plot, and McCauley keeps letting his own "heat" rise past the point where walking away would still be possible. Jeff compared it to a frog in slowly boiling water: McCauley thinks he knows where his limit is, and it turns out to be much higher than he expected.
Neither of us thinks the movie hands you a clean hero, either. De Niro's a criminal who still believes in doing things "the right way"; Pacino's cop has a wrecked home life and does his own share of ethically shaky things to get results. Matt's take is that watching the two of them is really a character study in who you end up rooting for, and it doesn't resolve as cleanly as you'd expect.
And then there's the part of the movie that needs no analysis at all: the bank-robbery shootout. Jeff is the first to admit it's wildly unrealistic how many police officers Val Kilmer mows down without going down himself, and it's still one of the best stretches in the whole film.
We both landed on a five out of five, and we're both looking forward to Heat 2, Michael Mann's long-rumored follow-up reportedly featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale. One heads-up if you're planning family movie night around this one: it's rated R, with heavy language and that bank-robbery shootout among other violent sequences, and Matt doesn't think most younger kids or teens would have the patience to follow it anyway.
