Heat Review

Mann's Los Angeles is glass, sodium light and open sky, shot by Dante Spinotti in cold blues that make the city feel like an aerial photograph the characters happen to inhabit. The bank job remains unmatched: real weapons recorded on location, almost no score underneath, and actors drilled until the reloads and covering fire read as procedure rather than choreography. The gunfire cracking off downtown facades is the detail everybody copied.

De Niro's McCauley and Pacino's Hanna are built as mirrored professionals, and the coffee shop scene works precisely because Mann shoots it plainly, two men in a booth with no crosscutting tricks. Where the film sags is breadth. Three hours accommodates a large number of domestic threads and several of them, particularly the stepdaughter material and Hanna's marriage, get sketched rather than developed, while Pacino himself pitches a few scenes at an odd shout. The Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd strand is better than it needed to be. The craft in the set pieces is close to definitive.