“Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.” These are the words a big time criminal named Neil (Robert De Niro) lives by. He only associates with his crew, has no love in his life, doesn’t even own furniture. He amasses wealth, but starts to wonder why.
Vincent (Al Pacino) is a detective brimming with passion, but not always for the right things. While he has a wife with a daughter from a previous relationship just waiting to become a real family to him, he’s too focused on his job.
Director Michael Mann spends the first hour of Heat expertly setting up the dichotomy between these two men. De Niro is quiet, detached, understated, and ready to walk away from everything at any minute. Pacino is loud, overly invested, brash, and will doggedly pursue his targets. Of course, once this opposition of two such expert opponents is set up (both the characters and the men playing them), it will start to break down. Neil longingly observes his associates’ relationships and starts to consider whether love may just be worth the risk of attachment. Meanwhile Vincent is hyper focused on the hunt and is gambling with the viability of his own personal attachments in the process.
These two kings meet on multiple occasions across a chessboard, both metaphorically and in the flesh, both as archetypes and as fully fleshed humans. Heat makes you question what you’re attached to; family, history, love, sex, money, self-indulgence, morality, duty, the job. And, inevitably, it asks you what we’re willing to walk away from when not doing so may cost you everything. It’s full of choices. And, of course, it has what may be the greatest heist/shoot out in film.