Heat (1995)

IMDb plot summary: A group of professional bank robbers start to feel the heat from police when they unknowingly leave a clue at their latest heist.
Directed by Michael Mann. Starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, and Jon Voight.

Crime movies are such a tough sell for me, but this one has a few very, very interesting scenes -- the diner, the interactions with Pacino and his wife, De Niro running from the car, and the final minute or so. The problem here is that they're hidden in the middle and the end of a 3-hour movie, and 2 1/2 hours of that are filled the kind of typical tedious cop-and-robber action that make me tune out most crime movies. I completely admit that's a personal bias rather than a problem with the genre itself, but there have been some great films that forced my interest in spite of the genre. This wasn't one of them. There wasn't nearly enough payoff to make the rest of it worth it. If this movie had been about 45 minutes shorter, it would have evened out a bit, but as it stands, there were only a few bright spots for me.

2 stars.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Heat < Red Eye
Heat > Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Heat < Water for Elephants
Heat > Camelot
Heat > Rust and Bone
Heat < Fargo
Heat < Legally Blonde
Heat < Blue's Big Musical Movie
Heat > Last of the Red Hot Lovers
Heat < The Muppet Christmas Carol
Final spot: #1541 out of 2357.