Cinema
Heat
Michael Mann · 1995
Synopsis
Los Angeles. Neil McCauley's team of professional robbers attacks an armoured van and makes off with one million six hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds; a recruit, Waingro, kills a guard for no reason, and the other two are killed in turn. The investigation falls to Lieutenant Vincent Hanna, of the robbery-homicide division, who is on his third marriage. McCauley, who forbids himself any tie he could not leave in thirty seconds, begins a relationship with Eady, a graphic designer. An informant links one of his men to the robbery, and Hanna has the gang put under surveillance.
Context
The story comes from Chuck Adamson, a Chicago policeman and a friend of its author, and from the manhunt he conducted in the early sixties against a robber whose name the character bears. Written as early as 1979, the screenplay first served as the pilot for a series that the network did not take up; it was broadcast in 1989 as a television film, cut to nearly a third of its length. Six years later, Mann took it up again in full for the cinema, and brought together on screen Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, who had appeared in the same film twenty-one years earlier without sharing a scene in it.
Who it is for
A crime film of two hours fifty minutes, with a double plot and many secondary characters.
Prizes and reception
A budget of sixty million dollars for one hundred and eighty-seven million in takings, and a street shootout cited among the most influential in action cinema.
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