Heat: The McCauley Cut

Heat is just about the perfect film to edit. It's an amazing movie that's an hour too long, filled with unnecessary plot elements. Long ago, there were a couple of really good SD Heat edits that are now likely lost to the ages.

DawnRazor has pulled off something great here. This is not only better than the original film, it's easily the best edit of Heat, far eclipsing the previous edits.

The picture looks great and the edits are just about seamless. There was one added stock footage clip, an overhead night time shot of LA where the video was obviously sped up and looked very out of place, but outside of that it's great. The audio is another matter, however. Heat has a brilliant 5.1 audio track that really comes alive in those incredible shootout scenes, Unfortunately the editor has decided to downgrade that to a stereo audio track, where all the brilliance of the original 5.1 audio is lost.

That said, it's not a fatal flaw. The story is the star here and DawnRazor has presented it perfectly. The closing credits sequence is an absolute masterclass in fanediting and worth the price of admission alone. Highly recommended to all.

I have to say, although I liked the TC, but as so many, I found it to be too long with too much time put into side stories. This edit has everything that is needed in my opinion to show the story, and to show the story surrounding the main character, the anti-hero. The edits make the movie so much more enjoyable and fast paced. After seeing it, I wanted to watch it again with my girlfriend, since the original version was always too long for her ;)

I could not find any editing error, neither in quality, nor in the edit itself. But I was also that much intrigued by the content, that I totally forgot to pay attention to the editing :) Which is another compliment.

Lastly I truly do not know why this edit has this little reviews, maybe because the original version was quite long so that most people do not want to bather watching it again (that almost happened to me) but I can only recommend to rewatch it using this version!
Great job!

A crisp and straight-ahead version of Mann's Heat.

A/V and Video quality are essentially perfect.

In the audio department, there's a moment at 28:30 where the vocals have been shifted out of alignment, and there was a cut further down the line where the music didn't carry across so the editing was obvious. But otherwise, the quality was quite good. The score was still nice and reserved. Felt a tiny bit quieter than my memory in places, but I'm getting old.

The revised ending was very well done, and actually more satisfying than I expected, though it felt more fever dream than grounded resolution. Ultimately, this is a story about tragedy (or at least it was), so this ending is hard for me to parse. I like it because I like Neil's character, but it also feels to-good-to-be-true. He wakes up, right?

In terms of narrative, my only concern is Donald's character. With so much story removed from the other people in Neil's orbit, it's conspicuous how much screen time Donald gets here. His story is very much self-contained within the larger picture, and is intended (I think) as foreshadowing to Neil's tragic end (after succumbing to his impulse to "go back"). Of course in this version, that's absent, which makes Donald's story feel like a superfluous curiosity in an otherwise straight-ahead Cop vs. Robber story.

I'm tempted to rate narrative a little lower, but with all that scenery chewing from Val Kilmer removed, you've done me a huge favor. Not to mention the removal of the absolutely terrible lines from Justine and Charlene ("What am I doing in this rat-bastard situation?!?", "You sift through the detritus...", etc.). Man, you should get a medal just for pulling that noise out. :)

Heat how it should have been. Under two hours and no boring moments.

A classic movie is now more focused with it's 2 hour runtime. The new ending also works great, I'm not sure why anyone would have a problem. At worst, this is a cool alternate way to watch a classic. At best, you'll never watch the theatrical version again. Zero editing issues, highly recommended.