Michael Mann’s Heat is a modern day crime classic, all-star cops and robbers flick
featuring an incredible cast, including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore,
Jon Voight, Ted Levine and Natalie Portman. It was the first film to pit the titanic duo
of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro against each other, in a film where we follow a
robbery gang planning their next major score and simultaneously the cops out to stop them.
Now Heat is a film with great character with established backstories which enhances the
sense of realism and world-building, and it’s with this in mind that Michael Mann has always
wanted to go back into that world. In fact, Heat itself isn’t even the first time Mann made Heat,
as the movie is a remake of Michael Mann’s own film LA Takedown.
Regardless, Mann has now revealed he has finished working on a sequel to Heat,
which is due to be released on August the 9th, only it isn’t actually a film, but a novel.
Now I know what you’re thinking now that you’ve clicked on this video and realised
it’s only a book. “Hey, CineRanter……” but I’m actually looking forward to this.
If you’re a member of this channel, you’ll know about my love for books
the idea of Mann revisiting this world, these great characters, on a paperback format is
pretty cool, and I’ll be interested in checking it out and seeing how it is.
I’m glad that Mann didn’t try to make a movie sequel. For one, we’ve seen more than
enough examples of film directors going back to projects that made them famous with new sequels or
prequels, and absolutely ruining them. Plus, Mann is not the same film-maker he once was in the 90s,
and much as we love him there is no way he’d be able to reach the greatness of
the original Heat again. There was talk of a film follow-up to Heat, but it looks like
Mann eventually decided on a novel instead. Man has written the book with Edgar-winning writer
Meg Gardiner, and as far as I’m aware, it’s pretty much just called Heat 2.
The book is both a sequel and a prequel to the 1995 film.
According to Deadline:
The novel Heat 2 starts one day after the events of the film, with a wounded Chris Shiherlis
[played by Val Kilmer in Heat] desperate to escape LA. The story moves to both the six years
preceding the heist and the years immediately following it, featuring new characters and new
worlds of high-end professional crime, with highly cinematic action sequences. The venues range from
the streets of L.A. to the inner sanctums of rival Taiwanese crime syndicates in a South
American free trade zone, to a massive drug cartel money-laundering operation just over the border in
Mexico, and eventually to Southeast Asia. Heat 2 explores the dangerous workings of international
criminal organizations with full-blooded portraits of its male and female inhabitants.
A key is a deep dive into the life of Hanna, six years earlier, in Chicago and signature cases
that honed his skills. It includes the failing of his earlier marriage, the effects of his Marine
Corp service in Vietnam and conflicts within the Chicago PD where he discovers his life’s calling –
the pursuit of armed and dangerous felons into the dark and wild places that would doom
his marriage in Heat. In Chicago, that included the hunt for a particularly vicious crime crew.
The book also covers the lives –six years before the bank heist — of master thieves McCauley
and Shiherlis, whose character becomes central in the post-1995 world of Heat,
as well as Charlene (Ashley Judd), Nate (Jon Voight), Trejo (Danny Trejo) and the
wheelchair-bound Kelso (Tom Noonan), who provided the bank alarm schematics to McCauley in the film.
Mann spoke about the book, saying:
It’s been my intention for a long time to do the further stories of Heat. There
was always a rich history or back-story about the events in these people’s lives
before 1995 in Heat and projection of where their lives would take them after.
The bank job was not the first time Kelso worked with McCauley, and not the last time
he will work with Chris. When I was writing the film, it was imperative for me to create
complete life stories about all the characters and to know everything about them. including
Neil McCauley’s early institutionalized years when he lost track of his brother,
before he parachuted into the streets, young, angry and dangerous. And, the novel shows a
McCauley very much attached and the dramatic events that resulted in his dictum that
“if you’re making moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life
that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.”
“My way of working with a project involves immersing into the culture of the subject
and accumulating a lot of detailed first-hand impressions and information.
I want to know and feel that culture and the lives of the people in it. Methods, attitudes,
and family values. I like to navigate these environments and operate within them. There’s
an authenticity discoverable there that I believe resonates with audiences as real and true.”
Prequels are inherently problematic, and there’s many issues that come about with
making them, like, for example, we will know how the characters end up,
explaining every little detail makes things less interesting
etc etc but I guess because it’s a book there’s an element where if I don’t like it, I can think,
“well so what, I’ll just etch it from memory” which is more difficult to do if it is a film.
The book will dive deep into the backstories of pretty much all the principle characters,
even apparently Val Kilmer’s character growing up with his teenage mother before
she was institutionalised, and Charlene’s previous life as a Vegas call girl.
I can’t help but feel that this all feels very unnecessary and has that whiff-
that Francis Coppola, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Peter Jackson smell,
of a veteran film-maker unable to let go of his previous achievements and avoid tinkering with it,
and this messing it up. Still though, I’ll check it out, and will let you know what I think of it.
Of course, Pacino and De Niro’s characters never met before Heat, so it does make you wonder about
the narrative flow and story structure if we’re getting a prequel exploring both
of the character’s backstories. Apparently they narrowly miss each other in Chicago in Heat 2.
You can’t help but feel this all feels a bit pointless, but I guess if done right there is
room for some interesting stories. Neil obviously has a history in the game,
and there’s that scene where Jon Voight breaks down Vincent Hanna’s history to Neil,
and he says something like “he’s taken down some heavy crews, blew away Frankiano
in Chicago – he was a fucking maniac” so maybe that’s something we’ll see explored.
So are you looking forward to Heat 2, or is this something you could do without?
Would you have preferred a movie? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for watching.