Wading into a movie by Michael Mann. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk.
Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. Why? He’s a Michael Mann Man. And he uses a lot of…Michael Mannerisms.
His name is Frank. The movie is Thief. In another diner his name is Neil. The movie is HEAT. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that
chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. He knows that whatever time he gets…is
luck.
In the Miami Vice movie, Gong Li manages to tell us, twice over, that TIME IS LUCK. This blog post is hidden in the wheel well, to fool you into thinking it’s the only one.
HEAT 2 is the book prequel/sequel to a movie by Michael Mann. We’ll see if the book is made into a movie sequel.
The one thing stopping that would be Mann’s death. He’s 83 as I type this, and I guess he’s looking to make one last big score. Whatever time he gets is luck. So. What does all this have to do with the price
of tea in China?
To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse.
The book is a sequel to a movie. Think on that for a second. There is no novelisation of the film itself. That throws a few curves into what should otherwise be a straight road of
a book. Mann teamed up with a novelist to bring HEAT 2 to life.
I don’t know which novelist for sure, but a casual glance at the internet hints at two writers being in the frame for the job: both men. When the collaboration finally hit
the shelves, crime writer Meg Gardiner had her name on the cover.
HEAT 2 is the first Meg Gardiner book I’ve read. I’ve watched an unholy amount of Michael Mann movies, television products, and analysis of same. Mann likes to fix things after the cinema release of a movie.
No. Better to say that he hates to fix things, but he fixes. So Frank, contemplative, looking on a seascape from an alien world, comes from a scene restored to Thief. Filmed, but cut out for the cinema. Sometimes things go the other way...
Mann removed the word detritus from HEAT. It’s there in HEAT 2. The word stood out in Mann’s movie, was conspicuous by its absence when cut, and is therefore notable for its appearance in the Meg Gardiner collaboration.
Again. To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse. Okay, maybe Meg Gardiner’s readership came on over to see what the fuss was about. But. This book is for people who have seen and enjoyed the film. That’s
a bare minimum requirement.
It helps if you’ve watched…
The Jericho Mile.
Thief.
Manhunter.
Miami Vice for television and the Miami Vice movie.
Crime Story. L.A. Takedown. Robbery Homicide Division. Luck. Tokyo Vice. All for television.
The car advert with Benicio del Toro. This is for Mercedes-Benz, with the title Lucky Star.
Go beyond HEAT and watch the deleted scenes from that movie as well.
Then there’s the cluster of films: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, both cuts of Blackhat, and interviews with Michael Mann.
Yes, all the other stuff. He had a hand in The Kingdom. It feels like a Michael Mann film. Speaking of which, I’d recommend To Live and Die in L.A. It’s an attempt at a Michael Mann movie without Mann as the director. This features William L. Petersen, who has a bit-part in Thief and is the Michael Mann Man in Manhunter.
What else? All the other stuff I didn’t mention. The Last of the Mohicans, and so on. If you want to go above and beyond the call of duty in watching a series put together by a bunch of people who went above and beyond the call of duty, there’s the gargantuan ONE HEAT MINUTE, which analyses HEAT cinematically, one minute at a time.
I’d think about the length of the movie before you even contemplate diving deep on that one. Every minute of a very long movie is given its own episode. If you think you have
the patience to handle a 40-minute discussion of one minute of film footage, try it on. And on and on. Half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour…minute by filmic minute.
An unholy amount of content, right there.
Where to start? Chuck Adamson. Chicago police. On the hunt for Neil McCauley and his whole fucking crew. Adamson co-created Crime Story for television. You’ll spot him in the movie Thief, on which he advised. He told Mann a whole bunch of anecdotes…
Neil McCauley was a criminal who called off a heist when he heard a sound in an empty building. McCauley correctly realised the noise was from cop surveillance on the site. This
story is worked into the movie HEAT. The cops and the robbers know who they are in this whole situation. Adamson meets the criminal on the street and decides to have
coffee with McCauley.
That scene becomes the biggest scene in HEAT. I know. For some of you, the action is the juice. I’ll settle for it…you know what I mean…I’ll buy that. Moving on. Adamson is in on an ambush of a heist, leaving McCauley and his crew
nowhere to go. One guy temporarily escapes. At the movies, he becomes the character of Chris. Adamson shoots McCauley dead.
Mann writes it up as a script of 180 pages. In the movie business, a page of script generates one minute of film. The time isn’t right, the stars don’t align, so he guts
the script and turns it into a television movie called L.A. Takedown.
Pre-production on a project is a huge thing for Mann. He spent longer filming the bank scene in HEAT than he spent on pre-production for the TV movie version. It took days to film for television and months to make the story fit on the big screen.
Mann recycles things. Xander Berkeley is on television in Miami Vice. He’s Waingro in L.A. Takedown. And he’s a very nervous Ralph in HEAT. Ralph’s actions lead to the destruction of a television set. You’ll find that scene in Crime Story.
What’s my point? If you had to write a prequel/sequel to a Michael Mann movie, you’d have to deliver a lot of Michael Mannerisms. You’d need to serve up a montage.
Highlights. There’d be no way around that.
But it’s okay. Mann did that already, across movies and television. Driven men, good at what they do, do bad things. They stare at water. Obsess over time, and luck, and the
price of tea in China. They are Michael Mann Men.
And they must deal with Michael Mann Women. There are two types of Michael Mann Woman. The first: she’s seen some shit. And the second: she’s not seen any shit, but she’s
gonna see a shitload of shit soon. None of this ends well.
In HEAT, Diane Venora plays Justine. She’s married to the driven detective, out on the edge, Vincent Hanna. It’s
Diane who has her line about detritus cut from the movie. She gives a great speech after everyone’s gone home.
The detective returns to the restaurant to pick up his wife after dealing with the fallout of Waingro’s murderous inclinations. Waingro of the television movie is incredibly
different from Waingro of the big screen outing.
Justine lays into Vincent and his inability to be there. (Vital, given Vincent’s command to a snitch to BE THERE elsewhere in this film.) Justine’s speech is riveting. It nails Vincent to the restaurant floor. Sets out his faults. He responds by stating, pretty much, that these
faults are assets in the hunt for criminals.
Faults, in trying to keep a marriage going. His third. HEAT unfolds with criminal inevitability. Cop and robber are tuned in to an exclusively shared frequency. Both understand each other. More than that. They understand that they are the only two players on this field who understand each other. This field is the entire world. A whole planet, and only these two guys relate to their opposites.
How do we know they are opposites? Vincent Hanna picks up a gun and leaves his home. Neil McCauley arrives home and sits a gun down. Both are driven men on opposite sides of the
law. Mann spells it out using everything. Cinematography. Sound. Editing. The guns, clothes, everything. Both men, home, strike a pose on opposite sides of the law. This is all deliberate.
In the case of Neil McCauley, we’re treated to his scene contemplating water in a colour called Michael Mann Blue™. What is this? It signifies mood, setting, terrain, forthcoming actions, choices, mistakes within choices, and fate. Mann recycles this colour or variations of it across his works.
The movie leads to a clash. And, leading away from that clash, into possibilities. Clash. The bank robbery goes to hell. Only Neil and Chris make it out, and Chris is barely in any
shape to carry on. All Neil has to do is drive to the airport and he’s gone. Possibilities.
But he’s not the guy to let things go. His way out is for absolutely ever. Never coming back. A multimillionaire. He’s off to Fiji, to stare into the ocean and contemplate
life. Except. He has to kill Waingro, who set him up to take the biggest fall. And so he does stop by to kill Waingro.
Neil has brought a woman to the scene of the impending crime. Eady is the Michael Mann Woman who has not seen any shit. From the moment Neil is exposed as a participant in an ultra-violent
robbery, Eady sees a shitload of shit. And none of that ends well for her.
Adamson killed McCauley. The movie gives us the same story. Cop kills robber. It’s a Warner Brothers movie, by way of Regency. Turns out that crime does pay, but at what cost?
Neil’s friend Chris escapes, knowing he can never be with his wife or child again. And? There’s a prequel/sequel book to this? Where the fuck can that even go?
We’re told on the cover that the book deals with 1988 to 2000. Meg Gardiner had to give the audience the Michael Mannverse. But that’s okay. Michael Mann already handed
us that. It is difficult, to move fixed pieces into a story. Playing with someone else’s building blocks, according to certain – very certain – rules and expectations.
Clearly, Meg Gardiner faced the same problem everyone else ever had with Michael Mann. He’s thorough. Driven. I guess he stares at seas, oceans, lakes. Contemplating his existence.
HEAT featured pretty rough shooting locations. Anyone who worked on that movie and The Last of the Mohicans just shrugged it all off.
What did Meg Gardiner do? She got on with it, and had a blast. Is it a Michael Mann crime story? Yes, it is. What must that feature? The idea that time is luck. We tick that box
off. Someone must stare out into water and contemplate the meaning of things.
Movie: Mann gives us Neil McCauley staring out at water. Michael Mann Blue™. Book: Meg Gardiner offers us the detective, Vincent Hanna, discovering the same location and staring out at the same body of water.
We have confirmed lore. It is hinted at, in Al Pacino’s performance as Hanna, that the detective indulges in cocaine from time to time. We had this revelation in discussions
of the movie. It’s in the book as part of the official fabric of the story.
There are loads of tiny details here, from across the Mannverse. I mentioned deleted scenes from HEAT. One is a short but memorable sequence with a visit to a fence/informant in a place packed with cheap television sets. Cut. Gone. Lost.
Recycled as a scene for use in the book.
How does the story unfold? It opens with the consequences of the bank job. Eady has seen some shit. She puts in an appearance to tie off a loose end or two. Then she’s out.
Justine and her daughter Lauren are given a few moments in the narrative.
We learn that Vincent Hanna did not divorce all of his wives. One died. Does this contradict the movie? When Nate is discussing Hanna’s career with Neil McCauley, there’s
a mention of two divorces. Current wife is Justine. Maybe Nate got the details wrong. Nate makes a few errors of judgement in the movie.
He misjudges a businessman, leading to the betrayal at the bank. And he misjudges Neil, in giving away Waingro’s location…believing that Neil won’t give a shit.
Neil gives a shit and blows Waingro away – creating the inevitable cops-and-robbers collision that ends the film. So here and there, Nate slips up.
Looking back, I liked the use of current wife in the movie. It’s a small set-up for Justine’s ejection from Vincent’s life. Maybe he’s into women on Prozac. This is where he goes wrong. There’s a scene near the start of
the film with Hanna in a stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building. Hanna being asked about…well, being there…and he has to duck that responsibility to go and fight crime. So he dashes downstairs.
And we have that near the end of the film. Hanna in a very stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building: now a hospital rather than a home. And another conversation
about, y’know, being there. He dashes downstairs to fight crime.
Maybe his earlier wife had just barely divorced him and he still thought of her as his wife when he raced to be with her as she died. That would square away the story.
Where are these characters in the book? Justine, Lauren, and Eady are mentioned. But there’s a shift in focus to the flashback. It’s 1988, and Neil is still alive. Still
taking down scores. He has another Michael Mann Woman to encounter. She’s seen some shit.
Chris meets his future wife Charlene for the first time, and becomes obsessed with her. She’s seen some shit. The other
members of the crew, Michael and Trejo, are given almost no time in the story.
It’s Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Hanna blew a guy away there, and we’re talking about a fucking maniac. Expect violence. Loose ends? In the immediate aftermath of the
bank robbery in the nineties, we have Hanna not doing something.
Waingro’s corpse is on a slab. There’ll be a DNA sample to try to tie him to unsolved crimes. He’ll be revealed as the serial killer Hanna
was tracking in a movie subplot. We never reach that scene.
Back to the eighties, in Chicago. Here are scenes we’ll never get, for reasons of story integrity. Hanna can only have a vague brush up against Neil and his crew. That must
be maintained and it is maintained. Playing with other people’s building blocks.
The narrative needs a Waingro villain. And it gets one. Neil is in town, planning to take down scores. The home invader, Wardell, is Waingro – but packing double the worst
trouble anyone ever had. Neil is interested in scores. Wardell becomes interested in Neil. Hanna is there to take down Wardell. All sorts of cats running around after mice.
Hanna is with the Chicago force. The only familiar person on his crew is Casals, who leaves Chicago with Vincent Hanna and goes to Los Angeles for the movie portion of the story.
We get virtually nothing on Casals as a character.
This is the Neil show, the Hanna show, and the Chris show, with Wardell flitting between sideshow and main show. There’s a theme here, concerning Wardell. In the movie HEAT, Hanna has a cop on his crew: Bosko.
Bosko is played by Ted Levine. A Michael Mann regular. In Crime Story, Ted Levine plays a villain who just keeps getting away. And I was reminded of that character thread in this book. Crime Story is Chicago, through and through. In HEAT 2, Wardell, as scummy as he is, just keeps getting away.
This is foreshadowing. Introduce your villain in the flashback. Give Neil and Chris more character background. Show that Vincent Hanna is the edgiest cop on the edge. Build Wardell
as a stone killer.
In the past, the action is the juice. We’re concerned with a high-risk score that has to go just right or everyone is dead. It’s taking the cartel’s money and vanishing
into nowheresville, fast.
This more or less plays out okay. What’s not okay is Wardell, who has cut into this crew. His plan is to throw his men at Neil’s men, post-heist, and reap the rewards.
Everything is fucked up. We see why Neil avoids attachment after this. His crew has to fade away. Wardell, being the villain we’ll definitely return to in the future, escapes
with loot. Building blocks. Plot set-ups. It’s very Chicago.
Belongs to the Thief and Crime Story segments of Mann’s career. HEAT, before there was HEAT. This part of the job, Meg Gardiner does well. She does the other part well, too, but…before
we even get into that…
Time passes. Many characters are dead and gone. Vincent Hanna is still in Los Angeles, with his crew. Drucker. Casals. Who is left? Nate. Chris. His wife Charlene. We go through
what happened to Chris and where he is now. Building a criminal empire. Staying away from his wife. Longing for her. In the movie…
This part is super important. On the run, Chris can’t resist trying to see Charlene. It’s a trap. The cops are waiting. Charlene gives a signal. Warns him off. He drives
out. Cops brace him on the street anyway.
His identity holds up. And then we see him lost in despair in his car, as he is about to head off into a new life – leaving Charlene behind for eternity. That’s what
we take away from the movie. The Michael Mann Woman sends the Michael Mann Man away. Cut and dried. That is it.
So where can this book go? Wisely, it sticks to that level of finality. Chris does distantly see Charlene again through a window. They talk on the phone, but that is all.
He knows
he still has to let her go as the book unfolds. This could have been easy to fuck up. But finality is finality. We don’t want them to get back together, and we don’t need that. The characters don’t need that.
Instead, we have this new criminal empire. It carries Chris back to Los Angeles. He wants to take down Vincent Hanna. Wardell resurfaces as the villain. What’s the tone of
this later part of the book?
It is generated from a cluster of movies: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and both cuts of Blackhat. For the cops-and-robbers stuff, you have Public Enemies. Mann occasionally dipped into biographical pictures. John Dillinger died in Chicago, so this
is very Chicago.
As for the other stuff. The Insider and Ali both feature dense layers of paranoia. Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat are certainly involved in crime…but they give us something different. Collateral does what HEAT did before. It made Los Angeles seem new, fresh, showing us a hidden visual side to Hollywoodland
that’s normally so generic in cinema.
Pause for thought. HEAT did that. And then Collateral did that, all over again. Fresh, twice. Which brings me to Meg Gardiner. She has to give us these characters again. Fresh, twice over. So she leans heavily into areas that interested Mann to a greater degree in his later films. Oh, he
was always interested in this stuff.
However, there’s a shift from the earlier work. This exists in Collateral to an extent, but comes to the forefront in Miami Vice and leaps from the screen in Blackhat. Massive criminal organisations. Heavy on the tech-stuff. No borders. International activity.
Electronics to the
left of you, computers to the right, and people in the shadows. Driven. Dedicated. With high-end skill-sets.
It’s hard to write about Miami Vice without stating underrated, or deserves a second look. Maybe check out the alternative cut of the movie. Barry Shabaka Henley, and we’ll call him a Michael Mann regular, is one of America’s best-kept acting secrets. He’s part of a cast dedicated
to bringing the story to life.
There are Michael Mann fans who walked away from fare like Miami Vice, Blackhat, and the television show Luck. “Mann had lost his touch.” They want HEAT. Okay. HEAT 2 isn’t for those people. HEAT 2 is for people who were into HEAT, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat.
I know Blackhat is a hard sell. Cyber crime. Was it a movie out of time? Right on the edge of what was happening, and yet
somehow a decade ahead of itself?
A movie that was going to inform the mainstream audience of internet criminality’s all-pervasive threat – all the way up to government level. No one wanted to know. Shit like that’s
all over the news on the daily, these days. In the fabric of existence, at breakfast and on through to sunset and after.
If you don’t like Miami Vice or Blackhat, I have news for you. Put the HEAT movie on. Enjoy what you have. No one has ruined your movie experience. Coming up into the year 2000, HEAT 2 gives you a party like it’s 1999 vibe.
Songs are referenced. But beyond those, you can feel the soundtrack. Mann sometimes employs multiple composers for his movie work. Across different eras, I could see Mann dividing
the musical tasks accordingly. A little bit of Elliot Goldenthal here, James Newton Howard there, Lisa Gerrard with Pieter Bourke. Maybe the unused finale track Goldenthal created for HEAT. Mann likes to recycle, after all.
Would HEAT 2 work as a movie? To get the job done, it’s pretty much a full recast of HEAT. Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, and Tom Noonan are gone. Noonan would have been a great return actor: the character of Kelso has a cyber security role to play in the book.
The book works as a book. Once you are through the immediate aftermath of the bank heist in 1995, and the building of a villain back in 1988, the conflict escalates into 2000. Mann
wasn’t happy, having to change the finale of Miami Vice. You can see the locations being used in the book. Unfinished business for Mann, perhaps.
Things go phenomenally bad in Neil’s past. We are treated to the origin of Neil’s desire to visit Fiji. He never gets there. Chris is the one who is home-free at the
end of the movie.
In the book, the three-way firefight involving Vincent, Chris, and the beyond evil Wardell…that’s the payoff to Chris setting up a new life for himself. He’s closing in on a big score so
that he can get out. But he turns from that to take a chance on extinguishing the detective who killed his buddy.
If you can’t stand Miami Vice, this is no-go for you. Same for Blackhat. That’s on the basis that Chris involves himself in the life of a Michael Mann Woman. It’s a lengthy
sequence. He has to be doing SOMETHING that’s going on far from Los Angeles. And if that global cyber criminal enterprise doesn’t float your boat, you’ll wonder why you are reading all of that stuff.
This is meant to be 1,500 words, and I’ve gone over that for obvious reasons. The movie. And the Michael Mann world-view across many movies and television shows. I had to mention
those things as a backdrop to a few references in the book.
The book works for me. It is not about doing thrill-seeker liquor-store hold-ups with a born to lose tattoo on anyone’s forehead. Meg Gardiner gave us a mini-series that would
barely be contained as a movie. You might not be into the technological criminal empire that Chris goes for.
It’s there to beef Chris up as a character who has changed somewhat over time. The build-up to the finale, the shootout, is terrific. I feel there’s a finality to the
ending…that isn’t about opening the possibilities of a sequel: HEAT 3. More…setting a mood saying we’re done here, and the protagonists never see each other again. A door is left open, but not much.
In the end, Meg Gardiner shows that in giving us driven people doing intense things, she is herself a Michael Mann Woman. She’s seen some shit. I’d write more, but this
blog’s transponder has been put on a bus to San Clemente. Or possibly Des Moines. So long, reader. You take it easy…you’re home-free.
