Movies You Gotta See: In ‘Heat’, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro finally face off

You really can’t beat a good old-fashioned face-off.

You have Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frasier; Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird; Iron Man vs. Captain America; Rocky Balboa vs. Apollo Creed; and, of course, who could forget Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson. Whether it’s in real life or film, every so often, we get an era-defining matchup.

From a star power perspective, Michael Mann’s 1995 Los Angeles crime epic Heat, starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, might be the high-water mark of movie showdowns.

I wish I’d been around for the release of Heat. I mean, I was “around” in the most literal sense in that I was born in 1994, but I envy those who were there at the time and understood how huge it was to have Pacino and De Niro going up against each other in a film. Even though they were both in The Godfather: Part II (Ever seen that one? Pretty good movie!), the two titans of cinema had never been in a scene together prior to Heat.

Here’s maybe the quickest movie rundown I’ve ever written: Neil McCauley (De Niro) is a veteran thief, leading what might be the ‘92 Dream Team of West Coast high-level crooks: Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), and Trejo (Danny Trejo. Yes, they really named Danny Trejo’s character “Trejo.”). The top-notch crew pulls an armored car job, which lands them on the radar of renowned and uber-dedicated LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Pacino). While Vincent and his guys investigate the robbery and get closer to cracking the case, Neil and company gear up for one last score that’ll set them up for life, setting Vincent and Neil on a collision course.

Look, I’m not going to dive too deep into the minutiae of the plot here. This column is more or less going to function as a list of things I love about Heat, and folks…the list is long. Heat, to me, is an amalgamation of a bunch of expertly-conceived and executed elements, and the film somehow ends up being even greater than the sum of its tremendous parts. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single movie that has more awesome stuff going for it.

Let’s start with the obvious: Goatee De Niro. Personally, I think it’s fine that the popularity of the goatee peaked somewhere around the early 2000s. It hasn’t aged particularly well, and society is probably better for it having been largely lost to the sands of time. But hey, there’s not much that Robert De Niro can’t do, and he 100% pulls off the goatee here. It’s a no-nonsense facial hair style for a no-nonsense guy, and therefore it suits Neil perfectly. After all, you can’t be running around, knocking over Los Angeles financial institutions looking like Tom Hanks in the back half of Cast Away.

We also have one of film’s great delights: Pacino completely sending it. Whereas De Niro is relatively controlled and even subdued as Neil, Pacino as Vincent, conversely, is, uh… neither of those things. I don’t mean this in a critical way; in fact, quite the opposite. For my money, Pacino is rivaled only by Jack Nicholson went it comes to Just Absolutely Going For It, and our guy Al has the pedal to the metal for pretty much the entirety of Heat. Although Pacino does effectively pump the brakes in several moments that call for it, he also picks interesting and occasionally downright odd and unintentionally funny times to dial it up, and it makes for an undeniably great performance that only he could deliver.

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the two big ones out of the way, let’s dive into some of the smaller aspects of Heat that make it a sublime cinematic experience.

Kilmer was on a bit of a heater at this juncture in his career, hammering out The Doors, True Romance, Tombstone (which I’ve written about), and Batman Forever from ’91 to ‘95. In Heat, Kilmer lands one of the coolest parts of the decade, being third-billed under two of our best actors. You probably could’ve argued around this time that Kilmer was destined for superstardom, but unfortunately, it didn’t pan out that way – from Heat on, except for a few good movies, Kilmer hit a pretty jarring cold stretch that he never fully bounced back from.

Heat’s supporting cast features an all-time assortment of Dudes You Love to See Pop Up in Stuff, including but not limited to Ted Levine, probably most well-known for being very into skin hydration in The Silence of the Lambs, which I wrote about back in July; Wes Studi, who, like Kilmer, also had a pretty cool ‘90s run, appearing in Dances With Wolves in 1990 and Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans two years later; William Fichtner, famous for having a gun in space in 1998’s Armageddon, another film I’ve written about; and Mykelti Williamson, who played Bubba Blue in Robert Zemeckis’ beloved 1994 classic Forrest Gump. For the record, I do think Sizemore and Trejo could be lumped into this category. Oh, and we simply cannot leave out Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance), who’s rocking both a sick mustache and a mullet. What a lineup of top-tier Guys. No notes.

I’d be remiss in writing about Heat without mentioning Waingro (Kevin Gage). Ah, Waingro. He’s a late addition to Neil’s crew on the armored car job. He’s also a loose cannon and just generally not a good dude, and he ends up being more or less the bane of Neil’s existence.  

Another cool casting tidbit: Vincent’s stepdaughter Lauren is played by the great Natalie Portman. Although Portman would go on to be one of the best actresses of her generation, and without giving too much away, I do have one question about her deeply depressing subplot in Heat: Do we need it? I suppose it’s there in part to help demonstrate the mess that is Vincent’s life – a point further driven home by his crumbling marriage to Justine (Diane Venora), who sports what appears to be an homage to the Jim Carrey Dumb and Dumber haircut. But man, this movie is three hours long. As much as I love seeing Portman in literally anything, I wouldn’t have been heartbroken if her Heat scenes had ultimately hit the cutting room floor.

You can’t talk about Heat without talking about the shootout, and hoo boy, it’s a doozie. In one of the movie’s key scenes, Neil’s crew and the LAPD, including Vincent and his boys, shoot it out on the streets of L.A., right in broad daylight. Mann cranks the gunfire to 11, and the deafening blasts coupled with close-quarters camera work puts the viewer right in the thick of the action. It’s a breathtaking, brilliantly-crafted sequence; one of cinema’s great gunfights.

The real faceoff we’d been waiting for doesn’t take place on the street, or in a bank vault, or in an interrogation room, but at a diner, where Vincent and Neil sit down for a cup of coffee. The two size each other up and realize they’re more alike than they thought. All they know are their respective lines of work. They’re both principled and devoted, and they acknowledge that, when the chips are down, neither will bend to the other. If they meet again, when it’s all said and done, only one of them is walking away.

The payoff of Pacino and De Niro finally sharing the screen is more than worth the decades-long wait. The weight of its significance is still palpable when watching the movie today, but the moment wasn’t too big for either actor. Of course, how could it be? They’re two of the best to ever do it. The simple scene – just a few minutes of note-perfect dialogue – is the ultimate showcase for two all-timers to shine.

The mutual respect between Pacino and De Niro goes beyond their characters, and the scene, and the film itself.  You can tell while watching the diner scene that they both know, almost certainly even more so than rest of us, that they’re sitting across from one of the true greats. The two masters have since been in a couple movies together – most notably Martin Scorsese’s 2019 masterpiece The Irishman – but Heat is a landmark moment in modern film, and Pacino and De Niro made the most of every second.

Okay, I’ll be honest here. Is Heat on the same level as the most iconic work of its stars? Not quite. But not every movie has to be Dog Day Afternoon, or Taxi Driver, The Godfather: Part II. Speaking for myself, sometimes I just want to see some robberies and shootouts. Sometimes, I just want to see a couple legends go head-to-head. Because for me, the action is the juice.

Jalen’s columns, “Movies You Gotta See” and “The Free Play,” can be found online at www.medium.com/@jalenmaki.  

Follow Jalen on Letterboxd at www.letterboxd.com/jalenmaki182/ to see what he’s been watching.