“Heat” is a big and reasonably sophisticated action picture with a cast of lots of familiar faces. I wasn’t too sure about “Heat” but I think there are enough good action scenes and enough good performances to warrant a recommendation.

In “Heat”, a ruthless police officer named Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino “The Godfather”, “Scarface”) is on the trail of an efficient gang of armed robbers lead by an equally ruthless criminal mastermind named Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro “Taxi Driver”), whose operations run like clockwork. Now Hanna and the police force must put the ‘heat’ on McCauley’s gang. This means Hanna won’t give up and will shoot McCauley if he needs to. However, the flipside is that if he’s boxed in, McCauley won’t hesitate to shoot Hanna.

Al Pacino does a reasonable job as Vincent Hanna. Robert De Niro does a good job as Neil McCauley. What I like is that just by knowing there’s a movie where the two square off; you don’t know who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and I love that. The rest of the cast do a reasonable job. There is a lot of famous faces from Jon Voight (“Transformers”), Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”), Val Kilmer (“Top Secret”), Danny Trejo (“Machete”) and lots more.

The best scene in this movie is not the action but when Hanna buys McCauley a coffee and to start with the two tell each other about their personal lives. It’s great to see a good guy and a bad guy interact like that as they’re both leaning on different sides of what is good and what is bad. Some of the action sequences are also very impressive. The famous faces aren’t just chucked in for no reason as a lot of them are not the sort you will instantly know by name.