The movie with the greatest set piece ever is finally getting a sequel!
Genre: Drama/Thriller/Crime
Premise: The lone survivor of a master thief’s crew evades a relentless detective’s shadow across decades and borders, from Chicago heists to L.A. freeways, in a web of betrayal, cartels, and redemption.
About: Making Heat 2 has become an obsession for Michael Mann. But the plummeting box office takes of movies like Blackhat have left the industry sour on a Mann sequel. So Mann took things into his own hands and wrote a Heat 2 novel, which made the NYT best seller list (side note: to make the list, you generally have to sell at least 5000 copies in one week). With buzz in his corner, Mann secured Adam Driver to play a young Neil (DeNiro) in 2023. But then Ferrari came out and bombed. Mann was up against a new hurdle – recasting icons like Pacino, DeNiro, and Val Kilmer, posed “impossible” hurdles. Warner Brothers, where the script adaptation of the novel was being developed, was not thrilled with the first draft, which, as we’ll talk about in a second, had a lot of timelines! But then a couple of weeks ago, the project moved over to United Artists with Leonardo DiCaprio attached and now it looks like the movie is finally going to happen.
Authors: Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner
Details: 450 pages
One of the prominent go-tos for amateur writers or filmmakers is that IF THEY ONLY HAD the same access to industry contacts that professional writers and filmmakers had, they’d be blowing up local cineplexes with a new movie every six months.
But they don’t realize that the hustle never ends. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how much success you’ve had. Unless you’ve just made a surprise hit film with a 10x multiple box office return (Get Out), you will ALWAYS have to hustle to get your next movie made. Michael Mann is the perfect example of this. He’s wanted to make Heat 2 for two decades. But no one has allowed him to make it.
This for a sequel to a movie that features a scene that is more influential to modern filmmakers than maybe any other scene in history. I am talking, of course, about the incredible bank robbery set piece in Heat. How good was this scene? It inspired the entirety of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Yes, it’s THAT influential.
Now, obviously, Michael Mann is dealing with different types of problems than the average unknown screenwriter. People have most certainly offered to make this sequel, but with a budget that didn’t make sense. Still, my point is valid. It doesn’t matter what the actual obstacle is. There will always be an obstacle to getting your project made.
It can be said that the people who find success in Hollywood are the ones who stop at nothing to find solutions to these obstacles. Which is exactly what Michael Mann did. There are only so many times you can walk into a room and pitch Heat 2 until it becomes noise to the executives. It’s like trying to sell a house that’s been on the market for 2 years. Nobody wants that house because all they’re thinking is, “well there must be something wrong with it if it’s been sitting on the market for that long.”
So Mann bet on himself and even at his age (82), spent a year of his life writing the novel for Heat 2 to drum up buzz again. And guess what? It worked. Because it got Warner Brothers actively working on it again. Which eventually led to a couple of weeks ago, when Leonardo DiCaprio signed on. And that’s all the investors needed to make this a go-picture.
Heat 2 is a novel with a very wide scope. We start off right after the events of the first film, set in 1995. Chris (Val Kilmer) is the only survivor from the infamous heist team and he’s got to get out of LA immediately or Detective Hanna (Al Pacino) is going to nail him. Some people help him escape across the Mexican border, and he eventually flies off to Paraguay.
We then cut to 1988 in Chicago where a younger Detective Hanna is hunting down some crazy dude named Otis Wardell who breaks into rich peoples’ homes, kills the fathers, and rapes the women, before running off with the loot. He’s truly crazy. Hanna sets a trap for him, which mostly works, as they’re able to kill his entire crew. But somehow, Wardell gets away.
Concurrently in the 1988 storyline, we see the inaugural meeting of Chris and Neil (Robert DeNiro) who become a team and start robbing banks. The team eventually focuses in on a cross-country shipping operation they can rob for 4.8 million dollars. We observe as they slowly put together and, finally, execute that plan.
We then cut to 1996 where Chris has become a security expert at a mall in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. He gets pulled into some criminal operation that provides an opportunity to make some real money again. But he eventually gets double-crossed and must flee the city.
Finally, the movie culminates in the year 2000, in LA, where Hanna now works. Detective Hanna has become more obsessive than ever when a murdered-woman case he’s working on appears to be tied back to a ghost. Yes, Otis Wardell is back! And when Chris shows up back in LA as well, his criminality tools sharpened from dancing with the craftiest of third world criminals, it will be a giant criminal showdown for the ages on one of LA’s glorious enormous highways.
I’m going to start off by stating the obvious.
THIS BOOK IS INSANE!
I don’t see any scenario by which this movie is under five hours long. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why Mann hasn’t been able to get it made! At 5 hours and four super-giant set pieces, it’s easily a 200 million dollar budget. Maybe more.
So the question becomes, is this story good enough to warrant that much of an investment?
I’ll say this. It’s better than I thought it would be.
Mann has some of the same issues that Paul Thomas Anderson has. He’s not great with narrative. His scripts can wander. So I was expecting that here. And while there is wandering, each time period has a storyline that clearly builds. So, at least, when we’re in these individual storylines, we’re invested.
My favorite storyline was Otis Wardell. I suspect that this is the role Leo’s going to play. It’s more age-appropriate than Chris, who at times is in his late 20s in this movie. Wardell is a classic 90s villain. He doesn’t just sneak into houses when no one’s home and steal their shit. He actively waits until the family is home so he can sexually assault half of them in the process of the heist. This guy is just a baaaaaaad dude.
Ironically, this makes Detective Hanna a much more enjoyable character. One of the downsides of Heat is that we didn’t really want Hanna to succeed. Cause we wanted Neil to win. But here, Wardell is so bad and Hanna becomes so consumed with taking him down, that we really really root for Hanna in this sequel. I would say he’s the standout character, even above Chris.
As much as I hate to say it, Chris’s storyline is the weakest. Paraguay is a nothing country in the average audience member’s mind. They rarely hear about it. They don’t know anything about it. So it seems like a strange place to build Chris’s story around. I suppose nobody knew about Casablanca before Casablanca came out but something about this storyline feels detached from the rest of the novel. It’s off on its own island and, therefore, feels inconsequential.
My guess is that Mann fell in love with this riverboat shootout in Ciudad del Este and moved hell and high water to shove it into the novel somehow. That set piece here will be the most unique of the movie, I guess. But I’d also presume that when the budget gets written up on this film and they start looking for places to cut, this Paraguay section will be the first to go. Unless they’re committed to the 5 hour version of the story.
All anybody really cares about, though, is, “Are we going to get our 2025 version of the best heist action scene ever?” And the answer is… yes. There’s this big shootout scene on LA’s 105 freeway that sounds like someone said, “How do we do the Heat heist set piece but make it ten times fucking crazier?”
And here’s what’s even cooler about that. Unlike in Heat, where the best set piece was in the middle of the movie, this set piece is the culmination of the movie. All of the storylines collide here. So it’s not just going to be a visceral experience. It’s going to be an emotional one. And therefore has the chance to be historic.
Michael Mann is his own worst enemy. He loves that driftiness. And he doesn’t seem to realize how much it hurts his movies. Does anybody remember Collateral? That was his last good movie and a big reason for that was, he was forced to eliminate the driftiness, cause everything took place over one night.
When he opens himself up to narratives such as this one, it’s like giving cotton candy to a sugar addict. It’s not helping things. Ironically, this is the exact kind of writing THAT WORKS WELL in a novel. So it works here (for the most part). But a movie needs to be focused. So many writers have tried to manipulate the format to embrace their unfocused narratives, determined to be the one writer who figures it out. And it never works. The rumor is that WB was like, “What the fuck is this crazy all-over-the-place script?” when they got that first draft. Which is why they had no issues kicking the project down the street to United Artists. “You deal with this,” they said.
It’s going to be up to someone with some actual writing know-how to guide Mann into a workable draft here. In all honesty, I think what they have to do is a) ditch the Paraguay stuff and b) tie Chris’s storyline to Hanna better. Right now, Hanna’s real beef is with Wardell. Chris is more of a side quest for him. I think that’s dumb. If this movie is really going to cook, those two storylines need to be interwoven much more tightly.
But I liked Heat 2. It’s not perfect but it’s a vibe, man. It’s worth checking out if you are a lover of Heat.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can’t include it all. We all want to. We love our stuff SOOOOOOO much. But we can’t include it all. The mark of a great writer is someone who is able to cut out something they love because they know the story will be better for it. And, by the way, I’m not referring to this novel. You have more leniency to keep multiple narratives in a novel. I’m talking about the movie. Movies are smaller than you think. They’re only 2 hours long. So you gotta cut things. But here’s why that’s such a good deal for you: It makes you really think hard about what’s important for your story. If you know everything can’t make it in, you will only include the best stuff.
