Alan Peter (AlanBP)

This truly is the finest heist movie ever made. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro square off against each other in an absolute epic. First time I watched this film I didn't enjoy it at all. I found it too long, felt it dragged out, still, I was 12. After watching it a few years later I really began to appreciate the cast, the film, the score, the storyline and I quickly grew to love everything about this film. It follows two people. Vincent Hanna played by Al Pacino and Neil McCauley played by Robert De Niro. Hanna on the side of the law, McCauley the master criminal. This movie involves perhaps the greatest rolling gun battle in the history of film, captured by Michael Mann in a manner which sets the heart racing. One of the most awesome scenes involving De Niro and Pacino when they sit as two regular guys, talk, have coffee as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. The electricity in that scene is enough to power the city of L.A on its own...it's breath-taking. You view the two men's alternate lives, they way a woman affects either man. At the start it's Pacino with the relationship, even if it is rocky and De Niro who is shut off from the world as a whole. He has nothing, it's his protection - the fact that he can drop, go and never look back, nothing holding him back. An yet it's a woman that's his ultimate downfall in what is an incredibly tense finale. The final scene of this movie is the finest conclusion to a film i've ever witnessed. The mutual appreciation between these two men as one is slowly slipping away, the other holding his hand, staring off into the L.A night as God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters starts playing....it's just absolutely perfect. An no review can do this film justice. Amazing, just amazing.

Everyone goes weak at the knees when they watch gun battles in such films as The Matrix, still, if you take a look at John Woo's earlier movies with Chow Yun-Fat at the helm you'll see those gun fights blown away. This is an absolute classic and along with Hard Boiled one of my favourite action movies. It follows an assassin played by Chow Yun-Fat (Mickey Mouse), who (by accident) blinds a beautiful singer in a gun fight at the beginning of the film. He's taken over by guilt and he helps this woman. At the same time he begins to fall for her and thus begins thinking about leaving the life, his life as an assassin. He takes one final job on so that he can retire, life with his girlfriend but his employers betray him in the end, pledging to have him killed. The gun fights are absolutely incredible, like nothing you'll see in present day main-stream cinema. Absolutely great film, right up there with the likes of Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow. If you like action movies you need to see this movie.