With Michael Mann‘s Heat 2 having finally settled upon an eager-beaver financier-distributor (United Artists) and ready to move next year with a budget of $170 million, HE has a comment or two.
With discussions about the 50-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio playing Chris Shiherlis, the role Val Kilmer played at age 35 in the 1995 original…I hate to say this because it sounds cruel, but isn’t Leo too old for this character?
Chris isn’t a strong supporting role in Heat 2, mind, and is pretty much the flat-out lead with Neil MacAuley, Robert De Niro‘s character from 30 years ago, appearing only in the first third.
Mann and Meg Gardiner‘s Heat 2, a novel published in ’22, serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the original, and it goes like this:
(a) a 1989 Chicago-based saga featuring Vincent Hanna and the super-villainous, Anton Chigur-like Otis Wordell (some kind of Waingro-like figure, only worse), along with MacAuley (please don’t hire the beak-nosed Adam Driver to succeed Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino…please don’t do this to us!), Chris Shiherlis and Michael Cerrito involved in the usual thievery and violence, and topped off with a tragic finish…
(b) a 1995 section that covers Chris’s escape from Los Angeles after Heat‘s big failed bank robbery, and his relocating to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay where more heavy stuff happens, and…
(c) a 2002 chapter that dramatizes a collision between Hanna, Wordell and Shiherlis.
Shiherlis would obviously be six years younger than his Heat age in the ’89 prequel, or 29 years old. He would be 42 in the 2002 finale. I interviewed a 19-year-old Leo at The Grill in ’94, so it feels pretty weird to suggest that he’s now a bit too too old to portray a ’90s-era bank-robber. But time doesn’t fuck around and he would be a little too creased and leathery to play a 29-year-old.
Mann would have to digitally de-age DiCaprio for the ’89 and ’95 sections. The Leo who starred in The Wolf of Wall Street would have had no problems in this regard.
Heat 2 can’t be all tension and bullets and adversaries. It needs love and longing, and an element of trust and settled vibes…a Jon Voight-like figure who speaks softly and cautiously and has the angles mostly anticipated.
Friendo who’s read Mann and Gardiner’s Heat 2: “It’s a good book. The vibe feels similar to the original Heat. Otis Wordell is the most compelling figure….he’s like a demonic Anton Chighur, and his presence imparts a certain kind of No Country for Old Men vibe. A haunting figure. Seems unkillable. Rapes/tortures people.”
