The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 33

The Guardian Thursday January 25 1996 Screen America's two raging bulls turned sacred cows, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, team up for the first time in Michael Mann's sprawling masterpiece, Heat Feud, what a scorcher Y- flKwSBdaLBBBBaflliBBy' iHBaaBnBBli BSjLBBaBBaBBaBBBBaaaaBaBBalftBBBBBaBaBBaaVKlflL HB 'SBIliil? aBBBBBBBBBBsiaifiliS? Pacino as bullish and stentorian as ever De Niro folds into the background Jonathan Romney sprawling whole, it's some sort of a masterpiece. At a time when the young turks are bending thriller conventions every whichway. Mann takes genre commonplaces as a given and restores them to peak form. Heat is an existential thriller the robber robs, the cop pursues and neither has the time for any kind of inner life. This sort of story can come across as paper-thin comic-strip stuff, but here it takes on a reso- nant grandeur.

What makes Heat as much an event as a movie is that it teams Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, American cinema's two raging bulls turned sacred cows "and that's all the high-concept pitch it needs. De Niro is the quietly ruthless loner behind a series of high-profile robberies; Pacino is out to get him. They play cat and mouse for three hours, and that's about the mea-sureofit. But the style of the pursuit is everything. For a start, there's the pace painstakingly strungout.butneVer dragging.

Mann intersperses spectacu lar bursts of action with tense stretches of dead time, long stalking periods that make us feel as if we're taking part in a relentless stakeout. Mann's masterstroke is to have his two leads barely meet. They only occasionally come together either to stare each other out or, in an extraordinary central scene, to exchange terse challenges over coffee. Mann stages a sober sequence of shot and counter-shot, in which you never sec both men's faces in one frame. Despite appearances, Pacino and De Niro did shoot the scene together; Mann's ploy is to capture the dynamic of their meeting yet stress their scparateness to tantalising effect.

Both men are lost figures in a forbidding landscape. The cop is drawing painfully away from his wife while the hood embarks on a seemingly doomed romance with a designer. The domestic scenes are the weak point of Mann's script, but they underscore the bleakness of the film's real romance between two men out to destroy each other and themselves. Mann lets us get lost too, amid a labyrinthine narrative anda huge cast of largely hostile faces. Dante Spinot-ti's often breathtaking photography takes us into a Los Angeles we've never seen before.

This is not so much a city as a vast undiscovered geological tract, captured in all its abstraction, its banality and at times its chilly beauty from a Japanese shopping precinct to an eerie car park that resembles some outcrop of Death Valley. The gigantism, though, is balanced by remarkable attention to detail. Mann thinks as much in sound as in vision and the soundtrack is superbly inventive, mixing rock and ambient music with Elliot Goldenthal's more conventional score. A nail-biting heist is scored entirely to a stark basso throb, followed by a shoot-out in which the gunfire itself takes over as a sort of abstract percusssion. The whole conception of Heat is in a sense musical it's all about orchestration.

The central performances themselves are not quite virtuoso: Pacino is as bullish and stentorian as ever, while De Niro folds into the background as the professional Invisible Man. What matters is the way the twoarecounterpointed.andif the other characters don't entirely register as solo turns, it's because they're used as parts in the symphonic backup: a self-effacing, brutish Val Kilmer, an alarmingly weathered Jon Voight, and the excellent, pithy Ashley Judd. Described this way. Heat may sound rather abstract and formalist, and it is but it's no less gripping for that. I was never enthralled by Mann's previous films, Manhunter and The Last Of The Mohicans, but Heat has a steely perfectionism and head-on ambition that recalls Stanley Kubrick.

Like Ku-hrick, Mann takes a genre premise that seems like no big deal, and expands it into a cosmos of its own. Heat might simply be the most spectacular B-movie ever made, but that's impressive enough. Quentin Taran-tino will be turning in his cradle. The rest ot the week's releases are reviewed on page 7. HEAT Din Michael Mann With Al Pacino.

Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer. Ashley Judd 770 mns. cert 15 EVERY now and then, you see a film Unit's indisput-' ably special, but for none of the obvious reasons. It may not seem to attempt anything new, it may not have a particularly good script or outstanding performances, it may seem insubstantial by conventional standards. Yet somehow it demands that you make a leap of faith and admit that, yes, this really is cinema.

Michael Mann'sHoat is just that. Seen us the sum of its parts, it's just a hie. slow cop thriller; taken as a bold, MADRID'S FINEST IS BACK ON TRACKI' 'i 'it. KMDIDB ALMQDOVAR 'STRIKES THE HEART MISS IT' TIME OUT i mj The cat and mouse chase. The intense, obsessive, perfectly pitted pair on opposite sides of the law.

That tried and trusted plot device brings the underpaid Incorruptible legal straight arrow against the arrogant, overpaid Illegal smartass ot flexible morals. Here we select Pacino's and De Niro's most memorable forerunners: The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1949) Blue corner: pointy-hatted, tea-drinking salt of the earth George Dixon (Jack Warner). Red corner: wlldand crazy tearaway Dirk Boga'rde (well, It was 1949). Dixon was killed, but was reincarnated to say "evening all" to generations of Saturday tea-ti me BBC viewers. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) Blue corner: glinty-eyed, jaw-jutting Glenn Ford.

Red corner: Mr Big, Alexander Scourby and evil, coflee-chucking henchman Lee Marvin. Cue apocalypse. The Samurai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967); The Driver (Waller Hill. 197fS) The most existentialist cop-robber duel yet. in both the French original and virtual remake.

Blue corner: Francois Perler and Bruce Dern at his twitchlesl. Red corner: immaculately blank Alain Deton, inevitably blank Ryan O'Neal. Dirty Harry (Don Siegol. 1971) Bluecor-ner: psychopathic, rule-breaker Callahan (Clint Eastwood). Red comer: sniper, rapist, killer and worst ol all hippie (Andy Robinson).

Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock. 1972) Blue corner: Inspector Alex McCowen. battling wife's cookery course. Red corner: pervy necktie-murderer Barry Foster in anachronistic late Hitchcock with typically grotesque set-piece. Black Widow (Bob Rafelson.

1987) The one that broke the boys' club mould. Blue corner: dowdy Debra Winger. Red corner, glamorous serial husband murderer Theresa Russell. Hints of mind games and lesbianism rather fizzled out. The Untouchables (Brian De Raima, 1987) Blue corner: straight arrow Kevin Costner in the role that made his name and made De Palma bankable again.

Red corner: sneery De Niro as smug, dapper Al Capone. A rare TV-inspired movie that was worth making. In Tho Line Of Fire (Wolfgang Peterson, 1993) Blue corner: slightly over-the-hill secret service man Clint Eastwood. Red corner: lizard-eyed John Malkovich as would-be presidential assassin (both pictured above). CI Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich No Way To Treat A Lady (Jack SmlghV 1968) Blue corner: George Segal; battling an overbearing Jewish mother and trying to start a relationship with Lee Remlck.

Red corner: Multiple Rod Stelgers. none ol them underacting. Bullitt (Peter Yates. 1968) Blue corner: spiky Steve McQueen. Red corner: smarmy Robert Vaughn.

A bumpy ride (or all In car chase city. The French Connection I and II (William Frledkin, 1971; John Frankenheimer. 1975) Blue corner: porkpie-hatted, bawdy, foul-mouthed Popeye Ooyle (Gene Hackman). Red corner: Bunuel's favourite bourgeois, Fernando Rey as Marseille's smoothest drug baron. ecrei.