Forget to mention Heat which was on the other day. V had never seen it and, although it's on fairly often, I realised that I've not sat down and watched it from start to finish since its initial release when I went to see it in the cinema.
Anyway, it's Michael Mann and so, obviously it's more macho than that scene at the start of Commando in which Arnie carries a tree would be if he was also oiled and naked and arm-wrestling a grizzly bear at the same time. There are LOTS of shouty sweary men shouting and swearing at each other all the time and all the women are reduced to being the wife of x or the daughter of y and most of the time they are really just there in the background being a tedious drag on our heroes, unreasonably expecting them to take the occasional break from their lives of relentlessly exciting machismo to do boring real world stuff such as be home for dinner as planned or pay the rent or whatever.
I'm not complaining about that though, that all comes with the territory; it's Michael Mann directing De Niro, Pacino, Danny Trejo (as the imaginatively named Trejo), Vale Kilmer, Jon Voight and more in a film about a crazy maverick cop obsessively trying to bring down a crack team of highly trained professional bank robbers whose leader is an ice cold pro as well as being, at the same time, a hotheaded macho motherfucker. Obviously it's swimming in the gallons of testosterone which are exploding out of every pore of every person involved in the project. There is simply no room left over for women to do anything except moan monotonously, whine neurotically or occasionally try and commit suicide. But complaining about that would be like marking down a Jane Austen adaptation for its lack of explosions.
And the narrative is satisfying complex with a number of subplots that are actually developed to a surprising degree of detail. Some minor characters get much more back story than you might expect and, for someone such as me who has recently started to get frustrated with the relatively shallowness of such things in films compared to the way that these 80 hour long tv series have the luxury of lingering on them for as long as they like, that can only be a good thing.
The actors do what they are supposed to in the main, and of course it's the first time that Vito Corleone is on screen with his (slightly older) son Michael Corleone. Or, in other words, it's the first time The Two Greatest Directors of Their Generation - DeNiro and Pacino - are actually in the same scene. At the time this was a major event, it was part of the selling point of the film. I even remember Mark Kermode at the time saying something about how that scene should send shivers down one's spine, and if it didn't then you should probably walk out of the film right then and there cos you would never understand the film.... or quite possibly film in general for that matter.
So where did it go wrong then?
Two words... Pacino and Al. My guess is he wanted to lay down some kind of marker, rise to the challenge and show that chump DeNiro who is really the greatest, once and for all. And so he went for it. He really fucking went for it... gibbering and screaming randomly, chewing the scenery and just generally burying the whole thing under one of the worst and most stupendously misjudged performances I've seen in a long time.
In the latest series of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry is blackmailed into giving a restaurant owner's talentless daughter the main role in his new show and they represent her as the worst actor of all time by making her shout and laugh and seesaw emotions in a manner startlingly reminiscent of Pacino's ego trip in Heat. He thinks he's winning an oscar while in fact he looks more like a senile old man whose subordinates are constantly struggling to remind him what film he's supposed to be in without bruising his incredibly macho and thus fragile ego.
Sadly you aren't gonna remember sinisterly gleaming cars gliding through the night as Moby's surprisingly unshit reworking of New Dawn Fades ratchets up the tension, you are going to remember Pacino's baboon-like attempt to inject an extra level of machismo into the film that needed that less than any other in history.