Sympathy for Neil and his crew

Films like this and shows like The Wire are amazing for showing the criminals as real people and at times vulnerable, and allowing the audience to have sympathy and even respect for the villians. Something British TV/film could learn a lot from - sadly we tend to use virtue or political correctness to get the audience onside. For example, in Hustle, rather than good character development and nuance, their idea of making the audience root for the crooks/con artists is to have them give their proceeds to the poor.

No sympathy for devil

Any character can be sympathetic simply by spending time with them and understanding their plight. American Psycho is an honest confession and we’re with him the whole way, he’s tormented by his murderous impulses, we might hate him for killing people and animals but we sympathies with him all the same.

Narrative art had been doing this centuries before Heat.

I think a lot of the arguments in this thread about "family" and "vulnerability" are ad hoc rationalizations. People may say they would never support evil, but history demonstrates otherwise.

Why do we like Neil and his crew? Because they're fascinating. They're exceptionally good at what they do. Were you interested in them after the armor car robbery? Of course. It's the same thing with the Tom Cruise character in Collateral.

Being interesting also means behaving in a way that is not predictable. Neil wraps his woman's glass in a paper towel, demonstrating that he's considerate. Cruise's Vincent buys Max's mother flowers. He's seemingly reluctant to gun down a jazz musician.

Can the mustache-twirling villain fascinate us? Sure. We expect them to do something predictably evil, and then they do something far more evil.

It's kind of funny because the men in this thread offering such rationalizations would roll their eyes at the real life women who fall in love with murderous psychopaths. "Riiiiiiiight. He's misunderstood. Deep down he's a sweet fella."

Between the directing and the acting they did a great job of humanizing these guys and I'll give them that. Objectively though, I feel no sympathy. The execution of that poor guard at the beginning showed these guys to be animals who had no problem killing innocent human beings simply because they felt entitled to the finer things in life without having to work for them.

White, male privilege. Plain and simple. Switch the gender and race and the audience won't sympathize with them.
Check the reaction to Hustlers, like Imdb reviews.

I think you can sympathize with a lot of reprehensible people, or at least recognize that they're still human, too, to some extent. You can cheer for bad guys (Ocean's Eleven) depending on context and presentation. I think remembering maxims like, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," and "there but for the Grace of God go I," are important when considering "bad" people and how we all should strive for redemption over condemnation.

However, I do think that some villains are villains - real life and fiction.

So I sympathize with Neil and his crew? To some extent, yes, but it depends which ones. Don, for instance (the replacement getaway driver) I find to be one of the most sympathetic characters in the whole movie. Turino, however, uses a girl as a human shield and comes off slimy to me. (Bosko's pretty sleazy, on the cop side)

I feel the most sympathy for Don, Neil, and Chris, although Neil and Chris each have heavy flaws. Chris is clearly in a pattern of bad behaviour that it's bringing a heavy toll on his marriage and relationships. Neil cuts himself off. Both gain sympathy as they care for people in their lives.

The irony, however, is that Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna loses sympathy from me when he lets his marriage fall apart. Of course, he gets a tonne of it for how well he treats his step-daughter.

I think the reason we sympathize with these guys is because Heat presents us with "real" people. They feel fully-developed. They aren't cookie-cutter anything. They're flawed. They're complex. They have good and bad. They have moral codes (Neil) that they follow even while being evil. Because we see them as human, we can sympathize. They aren't (mostly) total psychopaths. They're deeply flawed, but relatable.

At the end of the day, though, I never sympathized with them enough to want them to escape. I always wanted the law to win while watching this film. So maybe I'm not the right guy to ask. I don't think they're good or role models or anything.

To be honest, I didn't know anyone was sympathetic toward Neil and his crew?? 1st I've heard this??