The two men sit across from each other at a Formica table in a diner: Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one other, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee.
McCauley is a professional thief, skilled and gifted. When Hanna subtly suggests otherwise, he says, "You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store holdups with a 'Born to Lose' tattoo on my chest?" No, says the cop, he doesn't. The conversation comes to an end. The cop says, "I don't know how to do anything else." The thief says, "Neither do I." The scene concentrates the truth of "Heat," which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.
They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends - their women, for example.
The movie's other subject is the women. Two of the key players in "Heat" have wives, and in the course of the movie, McCauley will fall in love, which is against his policy. Hanna is working on his third marriage, with a woman named Justice (Diane Venora), who is bitter because his job obsesses him: "You live among the remains of dead people." One of McCauley's crime partners is a thief named Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), whose wife is Charlene (Ashley Judd).
McCauley's own policy is never to get involved in anything that he can't shed in 30 seconds flat. One day in a restaurant he gets into a conversation with Eady (Amy Brenneman), who asks him a lot of questions. "Lady," he says to her, "why are you so interested in what I do?" She is lonely. "I am alone," he tells her. "I am not lonely." He is in fact the loneliest man in the world, and soon finds that he needs her.
This is the age-old conflict in American action pictures, between the man with "man's work" and the female principal, the woman who wants to tame him, wants him to stay at home. "Heat," with an uncommonly literate screenplay by Mann, handles it with insight. The men in his movie are addicted to their lives. There is a scene where the thieves essentially have all the money they need. They can retire. McCauley even has a place picked out in New Zealand. But another job presents itself, and they cannot resist it: "It's the juice. It's the action." The movie intercuts these introspective scenes with big, bravura sequences of heists and shoot-outs. It opens with a complicated armored car robbery involving stolen semis and tow trucks. It continues with a meticulously conceived bank robbery.
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