HEAT 2 by Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner [review]

Heat 2 is a prequel / sequel to Michael Mann’s classic 1995 crime drama, Heat, and a rousing / riveting /action packed entertaining read it is.

For those keeping score at home, Heat is about a team of bank robbers led by Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) and Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) being relentlessly tracked by police officer Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino).

Loosely based on the exploits of real life 1960s bank robber Neil McCauley and Chuck Adamson, the police officer who brought him down, Heat first began life as a spec screenplay in 1979.

Over the years it brushed close to production a couple of times with heavyweights like Walter Hill being considered as director.

In 1989 Mann retooled it as a pilot for a TV series to be called L.A. Takedown.  When the network passed on the pilot, Mann recut it as a standalone TV movie.  Many of the characters retained their original names but Mann changed McCauley’s name to Patrick McLaren for the pilot.

While good, L.A. Takedown didn’t prove exceptional and Mann sought a chance to do his story with the full complexity of character and motivation he originally envisioned.    Six years after the failed pilot, Mann released Heat to theaters, and it now enjoys classic status among crime film buffs.

The movie is an expertly made thriller, filled with compelling characters and spectacular action sequences, but it’s best known today for the diner scene, a low key yet crackling tension moment when lawman and outlaw simply sit down for a cup of coffee and compare notes on their lives, realizing how much they’re alike.

Neither Hanna nor McCauley operate from “pure” motives (pure here not in the moral or ethical sense, but in the straightforwardness of their intent). 

What attracts the two to their mutually antagonistic careers is not a quest for justice on Hanna’s part or a desire for money on McCauley’s but the thrill of the challenge that provides the real meaning and purpose to their otherwise lonely lives.

It’s a great scene, and ironically it renders the rest of the movie pretty much superfluous.  Anything Heat needs to say gets said in this short scene.

Now, almost 30 years after Heat first hit the screens, Michael Mann writing in conjunction with crime writer Meg Gardiner presents us with Heat 2, a prequel / sequel novel.

Like its cinematic predecessor, Heat 2 offers complex characterizations and a good level of existential philosophical musing. 

It’s a smartly written book in every sense of the word, and the style is extremely cinematic, vividly creating scenes and settings and moods with a minimum of words, an angry, urgent poetry all its own.

The prequel part is a lead up to the events of the film, the sequel is what happens to Chris Shiherlis after the movie, with Vincent Hanna linking the two in his pursuit of not only McCauley and Shiherlis but also a new antagonist who enters the equation.

I like this novel very much and highly recommend it, but at the same time I get the feeling it may be the fusing of two previously unrelated Mann projects into a new form using the framework of one of his biggest hits.

The prequel portion feels like it could have been either a first draft of the original Heat screenplay or perhaps a proposed episode of the never-to-be L.A. Takedown series.

McCauley, Shiherlis, and the rest of their crew are presented as white hat bad guys; i.e., criminals who steal from other criminals.  They break into a Chicago bank vault and, among other items, find computer discs that reveal a literal drug cash flow from the United States into a cartel’s coffers in Mexico.

McCauley et al opt to take down the Mexican drug cartel’s money laundering operation and make off with literally tons of money.

However, the leader of a vicious home invasion robbery gang in Chicago learns of their plan and decides to rob the robbers, setting up a situation that continues past the events of the movie and into the sequel portion of the novel.

In and of itself, this portion works great and could easily make an exciting movie.  As a prequel to Heat, however, it presents too many of what Alfred Hitchcock would call “icebox moments.”

To Hitchcock, an icebox moment occurs after you’ve seen and enjoyed a movie in the theater, gone home, and as you prepare a late night snack before going to bed you start recalling the movie’s plot points and suddenly go, “Hey, wait a minute…”

The biggest problem with the prequel portion is found in the aforementioned diner scene.  McCauley’s personal mantra is "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

The movie show how this otherwise ice cold sociopathic criminal is done in by his love for a woman, a love that brings him back to her and into the path of detective Hanna.

In Heat we absolutely believe this is the Achilles’ heel that brings McCauley down, the one fatal mistake he made rather than run the risk of living alone for the rest of his life.

But in Heat 2 we learn the movie’s Eady (Amy Brenneman) is merely the second great love of McCauley’s life, that he lost an earlier love to the prequel’s uber-baddie, Otis Lloyd Wardell.

Not only are Wardell and McCauley’s first great love never even hinted at in the movie (and by the book’s account, McCauley would have ample reason to perpetually keep his eyes open for Wardell), but the fact McCauley violates his own sacrosanct rule of survival twice diminishes him as the uber-cool mastermind of the movie.

This is not a fatal flaw in the book, but it does give one pause when reaching for the fried chicken in the refrigerator late at night.

Wardell is also problematic.  Part of what leads me to suspect the prequel portion may have been in whole or in part a proposed TV episode is the near cartoonishness of this character.  Like Hanna and McCauley he does what he does for unclear motives, not merely satisfied with robbing families but acting out weird psycho /sexual dominance fantasies in the process.

He’s the least plausible and most unrealistic character in the story.  He’s given a big buildup in the book, referred to merely as “the boss” until Mann and Gardiner finally bring him forward, but there’s no real payoff. He’s not an established character with a secret life, he’s not someone whose position would immediately imply added peril to the other characters, he’s just a garden variety vicious street hoodlum who blundered in on McCauley’s plan to hijack the drug money.

In short, he comes across as the sort of character Arnold Schwarzenegger would be chasing in a medium budget 1980s action movie.

He fills a similar function in the prequel to that of Waingro (Kevin Gage) in the original movie, and while that’s fine for a standalone story, it makes the prequel suffer in comparison to the classic film.

The sequel portion of Heat 2 works better and ties in more directly to the movie. 

Chris Shiherlis, recovering from a near fatal gunshot, gets smuggled out of the country and down to Paraguay where, after healing, he joins the security detail for the Liu family in the triple border frontier town of Ciudad del Este, a freewheeling virtual lawless anarchy where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay share common territory.

This flows more logically than the prequel portion since it picks up where the prequel and original movie left off.  Like McCauley, Shiherlis also loved a woman in Heat; unlike McCauley, he did leave her when the heat came down, albeit not voluntarily.

Shiherlis’ attempts to make sense of his new life in Ciudad del Este, where drug cartels and multinational corporations operate openly and without restraint, offers some of the best writing in the book, and his ambitions grow from that of a high scoring bank robber to someone wanting in on that dizzying world.

He becomes involved with the Liu family, in particular Ana Liu, the neglected brilliant daughter of patriarch Daniel Liu, overlooked by her father in favor of his Eric Trumpish son Felix.

Felix is jealous of his sister’s abilities and strives to undermine her efforts while at the same time he falls under the sway of Claudio Chen, leader of a rival criminal corporate family.

This spells near disaster for the Liu family but before that can be averted, Shiherlis must come to terms with his feelings for Ana vs his desire to reunite with his former girlfriend and their son, as well as his desire to wreak revenge on detective Vincent Hanna for killing his friend and mentor Neil McCauley.

This brings him to Los Angeles where implausibly Wardell has managed to reinvent himself yet stay out of sight from various law enforcement agencies around the country trying to track him down for a string of brutal crimes in Chicago and elsewhere.

One could be snarky and say the resolution of this part of the sequel is a mass of coincidences, or one could be generous and say it’s an example of fate working on a Greek tragedy scale.

I opt for the generous view.

Once the Wardell situation is resolved, the book almost too quickly ties off the Shiherlis / Ana portion of its story.

It’s briskly written and well staged but also somewhat abrupt.  Its icebox moment is the realization that in this sort of story, the mastermind never attacks the protagonist in his lair, but the protagonist must come after the mastermind. 

The sequel ends with a hint at Heat 3, but to be honest I think that might be a project best left to our imagination.

It is a well written book despite the couple of icebox moments cited above, one I highly recommend.

© Buzz Dixon