The Red and Black

Michael Mann's criminal masterpiece "Heat" was re-released last week as a two-disc special edition featuring hours of documentaries, deleted scenes and a commentary by the director.

"Heat" is a Hollywood A-list tour de force, and while it isn't the first movie to include both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, it is the only one where the two have a scene face-to-face.

Most of "Heat" centers on Pacino and De Niro playing major league cops and robbers, but there is a laundry list of talent filling out this three-hour beast, including Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight and more than a dozen great cameos.

As complex as "Heat" is, watching it with Mann's new commentary takes an already dense film and flushes out the method behind even the most minute details of an amazingly cohesive story.

Since most of the hours of extra features are taken up by the full-length commentary, the reality of the extra content is a little disappointing for those looking for in-depth documentaries.

"True Crime" and "Crime Stories" explore the origins of Heat, the Chicago criminal on whom the film is based, and how the script changed over two decades before being made.

"Into the Fire" and "Pacino and De Niro: The Conversation" focus mainly on the production but aren't terribly interesting.

There are also 11 deleted scenes, but I would hardly call half of them scenes -- more like "seven to 25 random seconds of redundant talking and general stillness." Again, disappointing.

In the end, if you don't already own a copy of "Heat," this is definitely the one to pick up, but this double-dip isn't worth it otherwise.

In "Flight of the Phoenix," a remake of a 1965 film, a pilot (Dennis Quaid) and a group of oil men (and a woman, played by "Lord of the Rings'" Eowyn, Miranda Otto) stranded in the Gobi Desert must build a new plane from the wreckage of the old one in order to survive.

This almost-straight-to-DVD action vehicle isn't high cinema, but it's a pretty fun viewing experience.

The making-of feature "Trail of the Phoenix" plays like a mixture of a music video and an episode of "The Real World." Concept-wise, that's pretty interesting, but the feature doesn't really reveal much.

The DVD contains many extended scenes. The coolest one is an extended ending where a nomad on a motorcycle catches up to the plane and climbs aboard, opening fire on the occupants with a machine gun.

Why the directors chose to cut that from the theatrical release is beyond me. The other extras, such as a scene where the crew tries to dig themselves out of their plane in time to signal another aircraft, didn't work nearly as well.

The deleted scenes contributed little to the plot, so they were deleted for a reason.

The deleted scenes did have a commentary, which is rather unusual. The conversation about how they made the scene, and then why they deleted it, made a good bit of sense. The commentary had a ring of sadness -- they built a full-size replica of the plane, but had to delete the scene because it slowed the action down too much.

Article Tools