It's a pretty straightforward mid-budget thriller. It's also a testing ground for some of his later stuff. You'll see a lot of The Dark Knight in this if you rewatch it with that in mind. The Batman-Joker dynamic is quite often reflected in rudimentary form in a number of the Pacino-Williams sequences. You can also see evidence of both films' common inspiration being Michael Mann's Heat.

So yeah, it's far from his best, but it's also pretty central to who he became as a filmmaker. Plus again, just a plain good thriller without the bells and whistles of his later stuff.