Book Details
| Title: | Heat 2 | |
| Author: | Michael Mann, Meg Gardiner | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 09.09.22 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
| Date Read | Note |
| 09.09.22 | With a bad taste in my mouth from the QT novelization, I was a tiny bit skeptical going into this. I do think I see the reasoning behind writing a sequel to a 25-year old movie as a novel, but I was also wondering what kind of writer Mann would be? or if he wrote it at all and his co-author did all the heavy lifting? Well, I'm happy to say that I really liked the book. Borderline loved it. It felt right at home side by side with the movie, and played out in my head like one of the better Michael Mann films. It's got a Godfather Part 2 structure but we get to spend more time with not just the characters who survived the film but also see Neil McCauley's crew in peak form. There's an incredible coincidence at the heart of the plot and some of the... let's call it "criminal jargon" feels a tiny bit vague to me, but other than that I really enjoyed every page. And any doubts of Mann's direct involvement went out the window as the events of the movie are described in the book's prologue almost exactly how Mann described the film in his various interviews and commentaries over the years. He also involves Ciudad del Este that Mann somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into the Miami Vice movie (a location he's clearly enamored with), sprinkings of hacker shit from Blackhat, and a real effective antagonist in good company with Waingro or Vincent from Collateral. It just fits right in both stylistically and story-wise. So with all that in place, it's just a joy to step through a Michael Mann movie from the inside with all the thoughts and motivations for these characters spelled clear. The book is full of direct terse language, to the point, efficient. And the obvious benefit of having this be a book vs. a movie is casting. In your head, Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are frozen in 1995. No one's aged. LA hasn't aged. But it's already there because we have the movie as a guide, so I thought it was great, and worked better as a book than it would be a movie made today where you'd have to re-cast or spend a ton of money digitally de-aging and have it look terrible. really enjoyed it. |
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