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[1995. Directed by Michael Mann. Cast: Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Val Kilmer. Warner Bros. 170 mins.] Watching Michael Mann put the pieces of his craft together has been quite an interesting pastime. One of Hollywood's enigmatic talents through the last two decades, Mann has always seemed on the verge of doing something significant. . .only to slide back to mediocrity nearly each and every time.

The largest part of Mann's difficulty has been his penchant for overtly stylized cinematography. His first notable success, Thief, dazzled the viewer's eye with a flair whose only current equals are Nicolas Roeg and Jane Campion. But where Roeg's visual style is subordinated to his quirky intellectualism, and Campion is seemingly driven to rewrite the rules of the visual narrative, Mann's taste for middling melodramas has made his work of little serious consequence.

His subsequent films - The Keep, Manhunter, and The Last of the Mohicans - have been disjointed ventures that meander almost aimlessly. These films have staggered more through mangled scripts than they've thoughtfully entertained. Thus more often than not, Mann's promise to improve upon his previous efforts has only happened by increments. We can always count on getting bowled over, yet a little coherence would also be nice.

With Heat, Mann has finally fit his talents to a relatively straightforward story. Perhaps the film overplays its hand, but there's no question that his take on organized West Coast crime is clever.

The plot is simple: Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is a Los Angeles detective whose sole purpose in life is to hammer bad guys. On the other side of the badge, mastermind Neil McCauley's (Robert DeNiro) sole purpose in life is to jazz the cops who interfere with his business.

These two men's competition occupies most of the film's nearly three hours, but Mann's sprawling screenplay also has pit stops for two dysfunctional families, a wayward romance, and one of the finest action set pieces since the famed Starbuck shoot-out in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

Despite surface similarities with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, and the use of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfathers, the film that Mann obviously has at heart is Sergio Leone's woefully ignored Once Upon a Time in America. The fate of these two movies says more about the state of the entertainment industry than it does about the films themselves.

Once Upon a Time in America was butchered by its distributor so that it would fit comfortably in the two-hour rotation favored by film exhibitors. Unfortunately, the film was not only in tatters when it was finally released; far more important, it was incomprehensible. Only in the video "director's cut" does Leone's operatic saga make its considerable impact.

By contrast, Heat could lose one hour of its running time without much narrative loss. But what would be missing is the film's visual texture. And this atmospheric ambiance is what Mann does best. His ability to telegraph visual asides makes the film a visceral masterwork.

Add DeNiro's riveting performance to Pacino's bravado - with a nifty existential turn by Val Kilmer - and one leaves Heat in a thoroughly altered state of mind. Maybe this is why this film seems the ultimate California crime stopper.

Where else could such driven combatants let their vindictiveness flair so vividly...and with such mellifluous languor?

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JUMANJI [1995. Directed by Joe Johnston. Cast Robin Williams, BonnieHunt, Kirsten Dunst. Tristar Pictures. 104 mins.]

It's to be granted that Toy Story has generated quite a media buzz with its being the first completely computer animated motion picture made. The film deserves all the popular success it's currently enjoying. Yet its middle-of-the-road approach is also geared towards mass popular success. There's no edge to its raison d'être.

By contrast, the near equally popular Jumanji is a far more enigmatic film. This Robin Williams vehicle - despite its surprisingly commonplace story that has little in common with the Chris Van Allsburg story - represents the future of cinematic special effects. And once you overlook its hackneyed narrative, the wonders in store for future audiences is quite amazing.

Jumanji begins in 1869 when two New England boys fearfully bury a wooden case in which the Jumanji game is stashed. How they found it, why they're burying it, and the whole point of the sequence is of marginal consequence. We only know they're frightfully grateful to be rid of the accursed game.

Flash forward to 1969 and town nerd, Alan Parrish (Adam Hann-Byrd), discovers the case when it's accidentally excavated near his father's shoe factory. After tossing the game's dice in the company of a girlfriend, he gets magically drawn into the game board, and is lost in the jungles of Jumanji for a quarter-century.

Flash forward (again) to 1995 and two orphans, Judy and Peter (Kristen Dunst and Bradley Pierce), have inherited the Parrish mansion that was abandoned after Alan's disappearance. The Parrish shoe company has gone bankrupt and the old home town is a pale reflection of its enterprising self.

When the two kids discover the game board, they release Alan (Robin Williams) and inadvertently let loose a squadron of giant mosquitoes. Between the kids, Alan, and his once-upon-a-time girlfriend, Sarah (Bonnie Hunt), Jumanji escalates into a race to complete the game against man-eating vines, a loony 19th-century wild game hunter, and a rampaging herd of elephants, rhinoceros, and zebras. 

This is clearly a movie where more is not nearly enough. Lifting plot devices from The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop of Horrors, Romancing the Stone, Gremlins, and Back to the Future, Jumanji is every bit as frantic as one would expect...and perhaps even more so.

Indeed, director Johnston improves upon his previous Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, but that he succeeds says more about Jumanji that it does about his journeyman by-the-numbers plotting. But, then again, analysis is probably more harmful here than simply surrendering to the visual and aural barrage taking place on the big screen.

Which leads us back to the film's remarkable visual effects. Not that the figure is of any significance (excepting that it nearly outstrips some third-world economies), but the $65 million dollars used to make Jumanji hasn't been wasted. Granted, no single f/x packs the wallop of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but then it would also be difficult to top a hungry Tyrannosaurus. Jumanji cleverly moves in the opposite direction by giving us marauding animals that could escape from any local zoo.

Terminator 2, Death Becomes Her, The Last Action Hero, and Jurassic Park were only the beginning. Through the turn of the century, the special effects that are in store for us are going to be nearly unimaginable. Whether any filmmaker is resourceful enough to use these wondrous accouterments to create something of masterful importance remains to be seen, but as the little tot so rightly said in the otherwise forgettable Poltergeist: They're (definitely) here.

After a near half-century of fighting to keep their box office alive, the film studios may well have finally coined the alchemist's gold they've been desperately seeking. Through Cinemascope, Cinerama, Smell-o-Vision, and other sometimes daffy special effects, the presumption has always been that there had to be something that would drag audiences away from their television sets and back into motion picture theaters.