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Heat (1995) - Movie Review

Where to Watch: Amazon Prime Video

Movies, when you decide to watch one, what do you look at? The IMDB score? The Runtime? The Cast? The Genre? The Director? The book/material from which it draws inspiration?

When I started watching movies, I used to check the IMDB score. But there were many instances where I felt disappointed, mainly because some had a higher rating than they should have while others had a lower rating. Mostly I think IMDB is biased because users can skew the ratings. Otherwise, how does one justify Mithun Chakraborty's Gunda receiving 7.3/10 (as of 15th Aug 2023)? I reckon Metacritic's ratings on a scale of 100 makes sense for mainstream movies. I went through the list of my watched movies and gave a rating on a scale of 100 and checked their Metacritic Ratings and found them to be similar to what I had given. (for documentaries I generally don't refer to them as they usually have high ratings).

One of my favorite Film critics is Chris Stuckmann. I came across his review for Collateral (2004) and then saw the movie. In my view, the review was very accurate and I started following his YouTube channel. Collateral is directed by Michael Mann who also directed the Critically Acclaimed "Heat (1995)". Heat has been on my list for eight years now but I have been ignoring this movie because of its runtime of 2 hours and 50 minutes, and boy do I regret doing that.

Heat, a Crime Film, has a stellar cast with the likes of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Van Kilmer in leading roles. There is one Action Scene in between that is gripping and reminded me of the Nightclub scene in "Collateral". Another Scene with Robert De Niro and  Al Pacino (without any action) is equally enthralling. This movie gets a bit tedious in between because of the long run time and few might find it a bit confusing because of the huge cast and lack of character development. But these are minor issues that do not affect the good parts of this movie.

I highly recommend this movie to fans of IMDB, people avoiding movies with long Runtimes (as Roger Ebert used to say "No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough"), The Cast, The Genre, The Director, The True Story on which it is based.

If I were worthy enough of becoming a Critic on Metacritic, I would have given this movie a solid 80/100.

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