After The Last of the Mohicans, Mann returned to the crime genre with the masterful and mesmeric Heat.
This is a moody, sonorous and elegiac saga, famous for the first screen pairing of Robert De Niro, as master thief Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino, as LA cop Vincent Hanna. It is a film laden with death and a sense of sad inevitability as the characters wander around as phantasmal presences, finding each other only to lose each other again.
As a remake of his TV pilot L.A. Takedown, Heat is a mercurial exercise in cinematic form, shifting between the poles of elaborately choreographed action set-pieces to the long-lensed, tightly focused, intimate exchanges between couples. Personal dramas are played out in glass-walled houses, overlooking the sea or against the abstracted backdrops of flickering lights in cityscapes.
Three action sequences structure the film – an ambush, a street battle and a spectacular fight-to-the-death in the film’s climactic moments on an airplane runway. These experiments with the formal possibilities of the crime genre make Heat a high point in the cinema of Michael Mann.
Further and better info at the films below, all worth watching as a five series part.
Khoi Vinh has also some good insights on Micheal Mann, minimalism and especially Miami Vice.
