This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

You owe it to yourself to see Heat in the theater, or at least to see it in an environment in which you do not have access to your remote control and can't impulsively turn the volume down when the guns start going off.

You need to give up control because the movie is loud. It's also, at times, bright and chaotic and still. That's probably true of any three-hour-long movie, but I'm not just saying "A lot of things happen in this film." Writer-director Michael Mann and his crew make them happen in ways that you aren't used to. When I say Heat is loud, I mean that Mann and his sound team recorded actual guns firing blanks in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles and essentially didn't touch the noise or try to punch it up. That is gunfire echoing off buildings in a dense urban area and it is jostling. When I say Heat is bright, I mean that in its final scene, with Al Pacino's character chasing Robert DeNiro's around an airport at night, you get used to the dark before Mann throws a few blinding airplane lights at you in a way that will truly disorient, even if you know they're coming. I have watched Heat while my toddler was sleeping upstairs. I have frantically scrambled around for the remote. I have altered the experience.

This should be true of any movie, but it isn't. I'm going to get my throat slit by the film illuminati for this, but I could watch The Godfather subtitled, with the sound off, and it wouldn't be that different of an experience. You could replace all of the gunshot noises in a James Cameron film with wet farts and clown horns and it wouldn't bother me. But Heat is at its best when you're afraid your neighbor will call the cops.

I'm writing you from slot 18 of a 25 item list, but Heat was my number one. It hit number five on my ballot for our fake Sight and Sound poll a couple years ago and I'd put it higher today. It's my favorite action movie because it’s one of my favorite movies and the action is great. I don’t need my action movies to be this well-written or acted. Cynthia Rothrock is incredible, but she isn’t Cate Blanchett. She couldn’t do what Ashley Judd does here. And Cobra isn’t as tightly-plotted as Mann at his best. I don’t watch it for that. I watch it because Stallone cuts pizza with scissors and the bad guy has the wildest knife I’ve ever seen. But if you’ve got a movie that hits as hard as Heat and it’s able to check every other box, you’re experiencing something special. The action is the juice, but so is the sequence where DeNiro and Amy Brenneman almost escape to a quiet life but DeNiro realizes he can’t live with the idea of Kevin Gage’s Waingro getting away with screwing him over.

I honestly think it’s a perfect movie. Tom Noonan’s character, who plans the big heist and passes it off to DeNiro’s crew, is in the film for, at most, two minutes, and I love Tom Noonan. I wish I could watch ten new Tom Noonan movies every year. But I don’t want his character to get more screen time in Heat because I know Michael Mann designed this thing like a Swiss watch. You add more Tom Noonan, maybe you have to take something out, maybe the momentum slows down. There’s no point in second-guessing any part of Heat because I know what we actually got and I know how much I love it. Everything is connected, every second matters, and in a few of those seconds, Robert DeNiro throws a chair through William Fichtner’s living room window.