Heat
tromber

Review by tromber

Heat 1995

★★★★★

Rewatched 11 Oct 2020

Virtuosic action-driven storytelling.  Peak prestige dad material.  A hero who looks like a villain.  A villain who looks like a hero.  A rich tapestry stretching across the city between them.  A building tension as their unacknowledged love story mounts and mounts until they meet and deal with it.  The undeniable cosmic attraction of the cop and robber (in the mythic/genre sense).

The resolution between the two is elegant and like every previous second of the near three hour runtime, nothing is wasted.  The runtime is used to highlight the supporting characters, to texturize the world, enrichen our central pair.  And to let the action sequences breath.  But when it’s mano a mano, we’re in and out like the steady and decided swipe of a samurai blade.  Anticipation until it’s unbearable, then deftly, a breath of violence, and then we fall out the other side.  

It’s about what these childish games cause.  The violence and death and devastation left in the wake of men who can’t kick their adrenaline addiction.  The broken lives left behind on either side of the trigger.  Beautiful.

They make movies like this less and less. I miss them.

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