Hopes for a follow-up to Michael Mann’s seminal crime drama Heat, released in 1995, have never been higher. With the release of Michael Mann’s novelized sequel Heat 2, which has received widespread praise for its expansion of the mythos of Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), many of the original cast members of the film have spoken out in favour of bringing the two characters back to screens. At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Al Pacino expressed his desire to see Timothée Chalamet play a young Hanna in the film adaptation, and director Michael Mann appears to be working on script revisions for the movie.
Through a recent interview with Jim Vejvoda of IGN, Val Kilmer has added his voice to the chorus of fans demanding more from Mann. When asked which of his many films he would most want to see resurrected in a sequel, Kilmer had an assured response. ‘Heat would be great,’ he said to Vejvoda. “Michael Mann is one of my favourite directors. We trust each other deeply and have a wonderful dynamic together.” Mann offered plenty of cause to trust the franchise would be in excellent hands, even if this was the only picture Kilmer appeared in that he directed.
With flawed yet fascinating protagonists, the film has been called a masterpiece. It may not have won any awards, but it continues to set the bar for crime thrillers worldwide. In the film, Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis, one of McCauley’s henchmen and the lone survivor of the enormous bank gunfight that led to the capture of the master thief. As the film’s third protagonist, he would very probably return in a Heat sequel, as he is mentioned in Michael Mann’s sequel novel after his escape.
The irony here is that Top Gun: Maverick, another sequel that revisits a classic action picture years later with Kilmer as one of the key protagonists, is also mentioned in Vejvoda’s interview with Kilmer. Given the considerably shorter time span between Heat and the 2002 events in the novel, it is quite improbable that Kilmer will return to the big screen in a similar role as Maverick. Hollywood legends De Niro and Pacino gave stellar performances in the original film, which set them against one other in a game of cat and mouse that built suspense until the famous restaurant scene.
Their respective commitments to their respective professions as a burglar and a detective made it inevitable that McCauley and Hanna would come into conflict with one another. Over the course of his career, Mann has been eager to go more into these two characters and reveal how they came to be in the positions they do in the picture. In an effort to do so, and to finish up the events of the film Heat, Mann’s sequel novel vastly expands the scope of the Heat world, moving the action from Los Angeles to Mexico and Southeast Asia.
The book details Shiherlis’s flight to Mexico and subsequent hardships across the U.S. border and helps illuminate the links that would eventually bring McCauley and Hanna together according to author Meg Gardiner. It may seem difficult to adapt into a film because of the book’s jumping around between two different time periods and criminal organisations, but faith in Mann to do justice to these characters has never been higher.