Cool, calm and shuddering with machismo: Does Heat deserve its status as a heist classic?

Michael Mann’s film told the tale of two ultra-professional workaholics on either side of the law. Twenty-five years after it hit British cinemas, Geoffrey Macnab looks back on the Wagnerian epic

‘Heat’ was one of De Niro’s last truly great performances  (Rex Features)

The man lays down his gun and keys. He walks across to the window of his modernist, beachfront apartment and stands in the alcove, bathed in the pale blue light of dawn, looking out at the Pacific. He listens to the rolling of the waves as mournful, enigmatic music plays on the soundtrack. This is one of the definitive images from Michael Mann's blistering heist film Heat, a classic of Nineties cinema starring Robert De Niro as an existential loner and career thief. Everything in Heat is about calm and control. Even as fusillades of machine‐gun bullets ring out across LA streets, De Niro's Neil McCauley is composure itself.

It’s 25 years since it was released in the UK in the spring of 1996. The consensus then among British critics was that Mann had made an instant masterpiece. It was hailed as “the best American crime movie in over a decade", “a revelation” and “a film that is indisputably special”. But there was also a backlash from some spectators who felt that the film was all slick surface, no emotional depth. They had a point. The preening narcissism of Mann’s main characters is self-evident. There is no humour here and the portentousness can be hard to take.

What cannot be denied, though, is Mann’s chutzpah and his formal brilliance. In making Heat, the brash American filmmaker created a full-blown Wagnerian epic, or Californian version thereof, about subject matter normally tackled in Poverty Row B movies. In fact, Mann himself had directed a 1989 TV film called LA Takedown that told exactly the same story, but without stars like De Niro or Al Pacino and without the budget, stunts or gleaming cinematography. Nobody paid much attention. The TV film was seen as a mediocre west coast pastiche of Mann’s earlier television series Miami Vice. “Another stab at a Designer Cop Show", grumbled the LA Times, complaining about Mann’s clumsy attempts to blend stylised, Sam Peckinpah-like violence with New Age elements.