Michael Mann has been living with Heat for over forty years. Or at least its characters. When he first wrote the draft screenplay in 1979 for L.A. Takedown (1989), the unsuccessful TV pilot that was eventually remade into Heat in (1995), he was pulling threads from the career of Chicago ex-police officer Chuck Adamson — and his history with the real felons almost went back another two decades.
So, by the time we get to HEAT 2, the official sequel to action heist film, Mann and co-writer Meg Gardiner have a very rounded sense of who these characters are. At its core, this novel is a further exploration of those characters. Spanning 1988 to 2000, it is both a prequel and a continuation of their story, a tightly plotted action thriller that is an echo of its original.
If you haven’t seen Heat, stop reading this now and come back after a gripping two hours and 50 minutes of cops and robbers. For those of you that have, you’ll know that when we left that scene in Los Angeles, Detective Hanna (Al Pacino) had shot criminal Neil McCauley in the aftermath of an elaborate heist. Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), a member of his crew, was the only person to get away, although he had to leave his wife (Ashley Judd) and young son behind.
When HEAT 2 picks up, following a brief recap of the film’s events, Mann initially follows Shiherlis in the aftermath of Heat’s climactic showdown. With Hanna still on the hunt for him, Shiherlis lands in South America and starts a new life with a new crew. Meanwhile, we’re transported back to the late 1980s, when Shiherlis was last south of the border. In that period, a younger McCauley is preparing a job in Chicago, while Hanna is on the hunt for different crew with a sadistic home invasion modus operandi.
It’s here that the new story really cooks. Without the burdens of following such an epic story, ’80s Chicago takes on the backbone of the story and is vividly realised as ’90s Los Angeles. You can almost hear Pacino’s voice in the cracking dialogue, fired at a rapid pace as the narrative rolls and shifts with the punches. The setting is a very deliberate choice on Mann’s part: as a native Chicagoan, this part of the story thematically ties HEAT 2 as much to Thief as it does L.A. Takedown and Heat.
With a laser focus on this handful of characters, and an economy of language that matches contemporary thrillers, most of the individual set-pieces rip along at a pace — even at close to 500 pages. Yet there it doesn’t have the same cohesiveness of the singular plotting of its predecessor, taking more of a scattergun approach. The divergent and non-linear threads rely on coincidence, especially as the plot moves into 2000. Apart from a few action sequences, admittedly staged with the craft of a master, it just never feels like a whole entity.
There will be a lot of rhetoric that compares HEAT 2 to a Mann film. This is unsurprising given the source. Yet what this argument misses is that film and text are very different mediums, and the grafting of one onto the other might explain some of the scattered approach across the story. It’s still a good yarn, perhaps with the makings of a great film.
As of July 2022, Mann has still been talking about making that film, albeit with a different cast. “It’s kind of a Heat universe, in a way,” he told Empire. “And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.” In the meantime, this book is sure to scratch an itch — or it might just send you in the direction of a rewatch. Either way, it all goes to prove that there’s a spark in Heat almost three decades after its release.
2022 | US | WRITERS: Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner | PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Company (US), HarperCollins (Australia) | LENGTH: 480 pages | RELEASE DATE: 9 August 2022 (US), 18 August 2022 (Australia)
