DETROIT — There's a scene in Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic "Heat" where a crew of bank robbers, led by Robert De Niro's Neil McCauley, learns they've been made by a police task force, headed up by Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna.
Do they stay or go? Meaning, do they continue with their planned heist, or do they walk away, knowing in advance it's all headed south?
Neil goes around his team, asking his partners what they think, where their heads are at, whether they should walk. Michael Cheritto, played with cool, low simmering energy by Tom Sizemore, is unfazed by the prospect of the mission going up in flames. In fact, that raises the stakes, and to him it makes things a little bit more exciting.
"Well you know for me, the action is the juice," he tells Neil. "I'm in."
That was Sizemore. For the Detroit born and bred actor, who racked up an incredible string of roles in the 1990s and often embodied wiry characters playing fast and loose with the rules and fraying at the edges, the action was the juice. He died Friday, after suffering a brain aneurysm last month. He was 61.
Cinema in the '90s would not have been what it was without Sizemore's crazed, electrifying presence. He was a character actor who found himself in the firmament of the era's edgiest action movies and crime dramas, often playing cops with a shaky relationship with the law or guys who lost themselves inside whatever reality they'd created for themselves. He was Hollywood's top psychopath.
Cruise through the list of the decade's coolest, craziest, most enduring movies, and he's all over it: "Point Break," "Passenger 57," "True Romance," "Natural Born Killers," "Strange Days," "Devil in a Blue Dress," "Heat," "Saving Private Ryan," "Enemy of the State," "Bringing Out the Dead."
He worked with many of the best directors of the last 40 years, including Kathryn Bigelow, Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, David Lynch, Barry Sonnenfeld, Ron Shelton and Lawrence Kasdan. They all, to their own ends, wanted a bit of that Sizemore juice.
The juice spilled over into his personal life, and however dark the characters he played were, Sizemore was darker. He had his share of run-ins with the law, whether it was arrests, lawsuits, tabloid scandals, you name it. He did jail time after he was convicted of domestic abuse and making threats against his girlfriend Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam who ran a Los Angeles prostitution ring. It was one of several prison stints for the actor. There was also a Sizemore sex tape at one point, and it's best just to leave that one alone.
He struggled with various addictions most of his life and was no stranger to rehab facilities. In one instance, De Niro himself personally delivered Sizemore to rehab. "You're going to die," Sizemore said De Niro told him, and he wasn't going to let that happen. There was a time when Sizemore inspired that kind of loyalty in people.
He grew up in Corktown, part of a tough Roman Catholic family. Dad, Tom Sizemore Sr., was a Harvard-educated lawyer and philosophy professor who held jobs at University of Iowa and University of Michigan. But the dark side was never too far removed: two of Sizemore's uncles were heroin dealers, and another uncle was a pimp.
His parents divorced when he was a teenager, an ugly split that dragged on for several years which he described as a traumatizing, life-altering event. Sizemore, who saw "Taxi Driver" when he was all of 13 years old, found solace in the movies, in actors like Montgomery Clift and James Dean and yes, Robert De Niro. His heroes were larger than life big screen stars.
He wound up acting in local theater productions and found his calling. He took the lead in a Grosse Pointe Players presentation of "Bye Bye Birdie," and though he tried to keep his acting ambitions a secret, the secret was out. "I had a sort of anger that I didn't know what to do with, and acting felt like it could be a way I could creatively channel it," Sizemore wrote in his 2016 memoir, "By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There."
After high school he went to Wayne State University and eventually found his way to Hollywood, and made his big screen debut in the 1989 Sylvester Stallone vehicle "Lock Up." He was 27. Later that year he appeared in Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July," and the following March he was in Kathryn Bigelow's "Blue Steel." His '90s run was on its way.
He starred in 1997's monster-loose-in-the-museum thriller "The Relic" but for the most part he was a supporting player, Vinnie Johnson coming off the bench and hitting the clutch game-winning shot. He was at the top of his craft through 2001's "Black Hawk Down," but as the various horrors of his personal life mounted, his work suffered.
Sizemore continued appearing in movies — he racked up more than 250 acting credits over the course of his career, an astonishing figure — but the movies weren't as good as they once were. "Swindle," "Zyzzyx Road," "If I Tell You I Have to Kill You," "Durant's Never Closes," "Blood Runs Thick," "Adrenochrome": movies that were churned out, that he got paid for, and which now exist somewhere in the archives of Tubi or some other free streaming service, if they exist anywhere at all. In 2017, the same year he showed up in the revival of "Twin Peaks," he somehow appeared in 16 movies, and you haven't heard of any of them.
But for a long time, if a movie was going to have a certain edge to it, it had to have Sizemore. And it's not just that he was in those movies, he made his presence felt in those movies.
In "Point Break," he plays a police officer so deep undercover with a gang of speed freaks that he pours beer on his cereal, first thing in the morning, when no one's even looking. In "True Romance," he's a detective who flips a witness and then starts rooting for the guy he flipped him against, just because he respects how cool he is. ("True Romance" is that kind of movie.)
In "Natural Born Killers," he's a derelict detective who's even more messed up than the serial killers he's ostensibly chasing. In "Saving Private Ryan," he plays a soldier who realizes that saving Pvt. Ryan might be the one decent thing he can do in the whole godforsaken war, and in this life.
The list goes on. You didn't cast Sizemore as the romantic lead, the action hero or the comic relief. But if your movie needed a gritty dose of eccentric mania or hard boiled realism, you called Sizemore.
His signature role is probably "Heat," and even with just a few scenes he adds an indelible amount of richness and texture to the Los Angeles crime saga. You buy him as a lifer in the world of crime, a guy who knows he's not gonna make it out alive and see a happy ending, who's there for the thrill of the chase — the juice — and nothing else.
"Heat" is not best known for Sizemore's role. It was the long-in-the-making showdown between De Niro and Pacino, an epic prize fight decades in the making. But Sizemore is a key supporting player, helping to color in the edges of the frame, making everything around him a little better. At his best, that's what Sizemore did for his movies.
The same kind of loyalty De Niro showed Sizemore in real life, Sizemore's Cheritto shows to his crew, a tight knit gang that doesn't take kindly to outsiders. In an early scene they're handling their matters at a local diner, and De Niro's character has to bash a guy's head against a table. It's just business. When a patron two booths over looks over, butting in where he doesn't belong, Cheritto shoots him an ice cold death stare that would rattle the dead from their eternal sleep. Shaken to his core, the guy looks down and minds his own business, probably for the rest of his life.
When Cheritto tells Neil he's in on the heist, it's a no brainer. Of course he's down for the heist, that's who he is. Of course it all goes bad — that was a no brainer, too — and when he's backed into a corner, he picks up a child to use her as a human shield. It's a desperate move, an ugly move, a scumbag move. It's a bad way to go out. But you believe it all, because Sizemore was an actor who made you believe.
