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!).

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."