Heat (1995)

Michael Mann's 1995 cop and robber drama "Heat" tells the heartwarming story of a group of friends who had a dream. That dream was to pull off massive robberies.



I've always been kind of partial to Michael Mann's crime stories. Consider some of these titles: "Miami Vice," "The Insider," "Collateral," and upcoming John Dillinger movie "Public Enemies." He certainly tells a good cop and robber story where both the traditional good guy and bad guy characters are presented as being ethically compromised. "Heat" was the movie that really launched his career and that concept is definitely at play here.



One of the most exciting aspects of "Heat" was that for the first time ever, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be sharing the screen in the same movie. Granted, De Niro and Al Pacino were both in Godfather II, but because of the different stories being told set in different times they never were on screen at the same time. Also, don't make the common mistake of thinking that they were both in "Goodfellas," because that of course, is Joe Pesci, not Al Pacino that plays the loose cannon sidekick. So for the first time sharing a screen together are two Hollywood megastars made famous for their roles as gangsters. Take a look at the poster, you know there's going to be some high pressure acting going on between them right?:

Well... un pocito. Since Al Pacino plays a cop and Robert De Niro plays a bank robber, they only cross paths in two scenes. Even more frustrating for the viewer who is consciously aware of how exciting it is to have these two in the same movie, the director seems to have made a concerted effort to not have both of their faces in the same shot at any point during the movie. This leads to a disproportionate use of over the shoulder shots during the few scenes that their characters share. The scene in a diner is pretty cool though.

Val Kilmer plays De Niro's sidekick, a character named Chris Shiherlis. He's a family man with an unseemly long blond ponytail. He's also got some intense gambling debts which kind of force his hand into taking part in some increasingly brazen bank robberies even though the wifey is clearly sick of this life and trying to leave him. Even though he's one of four characters in the sort of inner circle of criminals, you can easily tell the De Niro likes him better than Tom Sizemore or that terrifying Mexican guy (whose so scary that the character is named after the actor!).

Batman Forever (1995)

Where to begin... If your average man on the street were asked to name one movie starring Val Kilmer, they would almost all say Batman Forever. He is universally remembered for his leading role as Batman. It is likely to be listed someday in his obiturary. Unfortunately, it is one of the absolute worst movies made in the 1990s.

I'm a little worried about how to approach this post because it's hard to explain the many places where this movie went wrong. There's no fatal coup d'grace here - this is a movie that dies a slow death from a thousand little cuts. I would like to think that Kilmer was unaware of the shitshow in which he was participating. I'd like to think that he was a serious actor who tried to bring a unique voice to a brooding and complex character. As anyone whose seen "The Dark Knight" can attest, when properly executed, Batman can be one of the most engaging characters of the superhero universe. According to no higher source than Kilmer's IMDB trivia page, he had a terrible working relationship with Joel Schumaker but enjoyed playing Batman. I think the conventional wisdom has it that Joel Schumaker is the man responsible for this godawful mess of a movie. He was given a chance for vindication but somehow made an even worse follow up with 1997's Batman and Robin. His IMDB page reads as a sad list of regretted wastes of time and uninviting avoidable flops. The end result of Batman Forever is a series of poorly thought out characters that don't really connect with each other and a story that just has so many weird implausible and obvious ommissions of rational thought that it's more puzzling than any of Jim Carrey's riddles.

I'll give you an example. Bruce Wayne is touring his factory when he spies the Bat-signal on the night sky (the lighting and full staff would suggest it's daytime). He quickly takes his leave of the factory tour (which, we're given the impression that he almost never visits this facility at all) and goes to his office which is apparently in this same unfrequented building. He goes to his desk and presses a button and a hole in the floor opens up that feeds him (in a sort of casket) through a tunnel at speeds of 200 miles per hour down to the batcave. Now, leave aside for a moment the fact that someone other than Bruce Wayne or Alfred would have to have built high speed slide by covertly creating a pipe that travels to the rurual Wayne Manor. Wouldn't the cleaning staff notice a big fucking trap door under this guy's desk?

Nicole Kidman plays a forensic psychologist who, when she's not busy acting totally slutty to both Bruce Wayne and Batman, offers inaccurate psychological insights into the mind of Two Face. Thankfully, I screened this film with a Psychology PhD candidate who was able to point out Kidman's many errors. For example, Kidman quite quickly diagnoses Two Face as having "Obsessive Disorder with homocidal features." Now maybe it's splitting hairs to point out that this doesn't exist, but if the script for Batman Forever was anything more than Joel Schumaker scribbling notes on a bar napkin, they could have called an actual psychologist to at least make an attempt at writing in something that's not totally made up. There's no shortage of actual psychologists in Los Angeles. Also, another unexplainable moment occurs when Bruce Wayne goes to visit her office in City Hall. He hears aggravated female grunts and hitting sounds. When he breaks down the door he finds her in the middle of a punching bag workout... in the middle of the day... in an enormous office at City Hall. What kind of psychologist is she that she has a punching bag in the middle of her office? It's not explained, it's just out there.

Perhaps the most blatant error of this movie is that with two supervillains, they decided to give them not one original voice. Instead, both Jim Carrey as The Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face, play cackling evil maniacs in the same way that Jack Nicholson played the Joker in the first of the modern series of Batman movies.

Compare this (about a minute and a half in):


With this:



It's a goddamn travesty. This ruined everyone who touched it for quite a while. Jim Carrey's never FULLY rebounded, Tommy Lee Jones had Men In Black but otherwise... tsk tsk, and Val Kilmer began a slow strange decent into his present trajectory. Only Michael Keaton has suffered a worse Batman curse.

Tombstone (1993)

Tombstone represents another major uptick in Kilmer's popular success. He plays the wild west legend and dentist known as Doc Holliday. While most of the actual facts of Doc Holiday's life have been accentuated by old West legend, it is established that he was a drunk, a gambler, suffered from consumption (that's tuberculosis for the uninitiated) and took part in a massive revenge killing spree initiated by the Earp family.



The movie Tombstone tells the tale of the former old West lawmen of the Earp family (Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan) settling down with their wives in Tombstone, Arizona. The Earps plan on striking it rich by basically extorting a healthy share of the profits out of a local casino by using their reputations for western machismo to provide protection. Doc Holiday (Kilmer) rides into town with his prostitute looking girlfriend and proceeds to be sweaty and pale all the time and say mildly rude things to the gang of toughs known as "The Cowboys." He's basically a fading Southern dandy. This forces Holiday's old friend Wyatt Earp to take his back and puts everyone into confrontation with The Cowboys... who are known for wearing fancy red sashes around their waste like some sort of gringo matadors. Seriously, Kilmer has never looked paler or sweatier:


I had originally seen Tombstone quite a while ago and seemed to remember it as a story of pure good guys (The Earps) faced against pure evil (the Cowboys). It's really a very morally gray movie. The Earps are siphoning off their money from an casino/bar that they just ran into and demanded a share of the profits. Their vigilantism, allbeit well intentioned, essentially sets of reciprical violence between the two groups. And when one of the Earps gets killed... oops... spoiler alert- the murder spree that they conduct is just brutal. They set about hunting down these Cowboys in what is basically a "The Most Dangerous Game" type killing spree. Can nothing satiate Kirk Russell's mad bloodlust?!

The leader of the Cowboys, Curly Bill, is played by Powers Boothe (stage name? probably), who went on to play Cy Tolliver in the awesome Deadwood series on HBO:



Tombstone was a mega-hit that capped off a glut of mid 90s wild west movies. This was a huge win for Kilmer who continued his string of vigilante heroes soon after this with his most memorable (and possibly worst) role... Batman. As memorably said by Doc Holiday, "I have not yet begun to defile myself."