 Over the last couple of years I've seen this question pop up from time to time in different social media feeds and that is, what is a man? Whenever I hear the question I kind of chuckle and think what a odd thing to ask. I mean it's gonna vary from person to person and from culture to culture. But then I rewatched Michael Mann's Heat and the answer hit me like a ton of bricks. You want to know what a man is? A man is a guy who works all day, he comes home, takes off his shoes, sits down on his recliner, pops open a bottle of scotch on the rocks and puts on heat for the 80th time. He can't be bothered right now. He has a three hour tour day forced to sit through about some of the best men in the business doing heists. That's heat. That's the definition of a man. Let's talk about it further. The reason I get the privilege of talking about this brilliant film today is because Gummo over on YouTube decided to throw some money at me to review this film. And you too can be like this gentleman and become a member at patreon.com slash adamdoesmovies where there's a $30 mithril tier. At that level you get a movie review every couple months as long as you stay with it. I give you a shout out and it's a lovely thing. You can also do the same thing on YouTube, the same tier as apply. That's where my buddy Gummo was at. And now let's talk about heat. So thank you again, sir. Robert De Niro plays Neil Macaulay. He has a very special set of skills, skills he's acquired I assume over many years in the industry and that industry that profession is professional heist guy. I don't know what do you call that? What do you call that job? I'm a heister. I steal, I'm a robber. I steal things. I guess robbers. But that just seems like not classy enough for what our guy does. And he will tell you he is precise. He's calculated. He knows the ins and outs of every score he's about to do. Every hit is meticulously planned out from top to bottom and he picks out the thousand ways it can go sideways. And he comes up with escapes for each. He comes up with scenarios. He comes up with solutions. Now on the other end of the coin, we have Al Pacino. Okay, okay. Al Pacino's in the mix. Lieutenant Vincent Hanna isn't screwing around. This guy's been in the game long enough to spot a pro when one shows up. Neil's not alone though. He's got a team. He's got his trusted guy, his wingman I guess would be appropriate and that's Val Kilmer. And then there's Tom Sizemore as Michael. And of course, every good crew needs a wild card. And that's the asshole that's going to screw this whole thing up for our team as this movie progresses. And in order to find these jobs, they have to have a guy who kind of bankrolls this whole thing, who finds these marks. And that's John Voight, America's sweetheart, John Voight. And this is just some of the great A talent on display. We got William Feitner in this thing. We have Hank Azaria and we even have a little Natalie Portman show up once in a while to drag this whole movie to a screeching halt. Now as I stated, this movie is almost three hours long. It runs two hours and 50 minutes. One of my criticisms, it's a bit too long. We could shave off 20 to 30 minutes. And I don't think it would lose anything. In fact, I think it'd be better for it. The stuff that is extended here is a lot of the relationship crap between Portman and her father Pacino. We also have De Niro's character getting to know a young Philly. We got Kilmer's character who's having a really hard time with his relationship and trying to make that thing work. Spoiler, it's not going to work because the through line of this movie kids is you have your career and nothing else. When you're in this position, you have to cut ties with everything you love in your real world because your real world shouldn't exist. It should all be the heist. It should all be the job, whether you're on the good side of it or the bad side of it. Pacino cannot hold his family together because he is 24 seven thinking about the next play, thinking about where these assholes are going to be and why they're setting up shop over here and what they're going to be targeting next. And De Niro's got to be five steps ahead of him. And Neil Macaulay makes that very clear to his men multiple times. You can't have connections because at the drop of a hat, you have to be willing to pick everything up and blow out a dodge, leave it all behind. This movie is absolute perfection when it's these guys sitting around talking about how good they are at things. I find it very interesting when people are just amazing at stuff, whether it's a chef cooking up a storm or a woodworker building a fucking stool. That's interesting to me. That's exciting to me. And that's really where heat excels. Listening to these guys plan everything out. Listening to Pacino go nuts on people. Okay, you think these guys are gonna be here? They're gonna be over there. You don't know what they're gonna do next. He's also a fan of a big ass respect. There are certain movies people will point to and say that's the blueprint. And I truly believe heat is one such film. It's inspired so many different movies and video games. At the top of my head, I think about the amazing spot in Grand Theft Auto 5, I think, where it basically recreates the entire sequence from heat. You watch this movie and then watch something by Christopher Nolan, specifically Dark Knight. I think it's probably pretty fair to say Christopher Nolan liked what Michael Mann was doing with this stuff and took a lot of inspiration as far as how that camera set up the cinematography, the grittiness, the rawness of it all. Heat from a production standpoint stands up perfectly. It hasn't missed a beat. It sounds phenomenal. The music is frantic. The lighting is great. It's chaotic. It's energetic. But it's got this dourness to it. Those blue hues, that granite city. It's just very sterile. It's very distant by design. These people aren't real people. They don't have the same problems you and I do because they're living in this other world. Not a world I would love to be in, but certainly one I really enjoy watching along with. Well, that's 1995's Heat, a freaking awesome movie. Special thank you again to Gumo for the recommendation. Okay, time to hit the subscribe button, like the video if you in fact like the video. And if you haven't seen Heat, do yourself the favor. Schedule a little time, pour that glass of scotch and become a man. See you next time. I really can't do it, but you know it all. Just okay.