Didn’t like it, but I didn’t hate it. It was kind of “meh.”
The payoff wasn’t much.
I didn’t even love the shootout.
DeNiro didn’t “act” in The Score; he merely showed up and collected a paycheck. (Ditto for Brando; Ed Norton was the standout here, insofar as the script allowed for.)
DeNiro’s acting in Heat; watch the scene where he meets Eady in the coffeeshop, and later, his reaction during the dinner party while the other members of his gang, all family men, laugh and kid with their wives and children. His sense that he is missing something from life that everybody else has a taste of is palletable. His deadpan, yet menacing, phone call to Van Zant–“What am I doing? I’m talking to an empty telephone…‘Cause there is a dead man on the other end of this fuckin’ line”–is great. He even handles the romantic scenes–something Mann does terribly–with a sense of unease that his calculated coolness isn’t going to give him what he needs. DeNiro is good at underplaying characters; for some people, they have a hard time as seeing that as being acting at all, but Billy Wilder (who responded to Jack Lemmon’s planitive plea of “What do you want, nothing?” by looking heavenward and muttering, “Please.”) would have loved it. He is, his recent paycheck work notwithstanding, legitimately credited as being one of the best actors in the last fifty years.
Pacino is also a great actor (see his understated performances in the first two Godfather films and the otherwise unexceptional Carlito’s Way) but seems to be largely stuck in the mold of the characters he portrayed in Dog Day Afternoon and …And Justice For All. Those characters had a legitimate reason to be hysterical (although I find the latter an overblown and excessively elevated film) but subsequent roles haven’t benefitted from his excess; ditto with Jack Nickelson, who also seems to have confused egregious emoting with acting. Nonetheless, the schtick is intermittantly amusing, and at least in Heat, the character is supposed to be edgy and obnoxious.
IMHO, YMMV.
Stranger
I was never able to muster enough interest to watch it for very long. So I’m gonna have to say I don’t like it.
Great flick. Awesome gunplay/robbery scenes. Good story. Liked Deniro and the black detective meeting the snitch at a dogfighting place in ‘rural’ LA, Val Kilmer skipping out at the end; Deniro’s last minute vengeance screwing things up for him. Lots of good stuff.
One of my all-time favorite action movies, along with Ghost Dog: it’s more about the characters, and less about some over-the-top action. I really, really enjoyed it.
Daniel
I liked Heat quite a bit. Mind you, I haven’t seen it in quite some time, so I am curious if it will stand the test of time. For the time being, I’m going to have to go in the I Liked It camp.
Although I hated the ending, I liked Heat quite a bit. It had an incredibly well-done and realistic gunfight that is just about standard for me testing out home theater sound systems.
Put me down for liking it.
Note that the diner scene does not feature both De Niro and Pacino in the one camera shot. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that they weren’t even on the set together during the filming of that scene. Its the only scene in which they both feature.
Not true, not true, and not true.
In the VHS “pan-n-scan” version, they don’t share the same frame, owing to the fact that Mann used the entire (Panaramic) frame. In the widescreen or cinematic viewing, however, they do, in fact, appear together in that scene. I don’t know about the DVD version, as sometimes even “widescreen” versions end up trimming a certain amount of the frames, but I’ve seen the film in its original cinematic format at both Arclight Cinemas and the New Beverly Cinema, and it is clear that they are both there. Plus, the at the diner where they shot the scene (Kate Mantilini, on Wilshire, very mediocre food for outrageous prices) there is a still image that clearly shows them sitting across from one another, signed by both actors and Mann.
The also appear together in two other scenes; the preceding scene, where Hanna pulls over McCauley on the highway, and the final scene at the airport, where they shake hands as McCauley is dying.
I have to agree with RikWriter that the ending was a bit of a cop-out; t’were I writing it, I’d have Hanna mortally wounding McCauley, but not finding the body. The “bonding” in the final scene was kind of bullshit, really. McCauley, for all the film tries to portray him as a misunderstood soul, is a cold-blooded killer, and however much Hanna might be co-dependant on him (so to speak) I don’t really get him grasping McCauley’s hand in some kind of kinship. But it’s Michael Mann, and he tends to go for highly stylized bullshit. See the ending of Collateral for confirmation of that.
Stranger