Alongside the various podcasts and retrospectives, regular rep screenings and endless stream of social media discourse and memes dedicated to Heat<\/em>, the last decade-plus has seen a number of movies openly bearing\u2014or in a couple cases, shamelessly flaunting\u2014its massive influence on their sleeve like a prison tattoo. Taken as a whole, there\u2019s even an argument to be made that Heat<\/em> isn\u2019t so much a movie these days as it is a blueprint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right from the jump, Mann\u2019s magnum opus, about a pair of obsessive rivals\/soulmates\u2014Al Pacino\u2019s hotblooded, high-wired Det. Vincent Hannah and Robert De Niro\u2019s cool and calculated career criminal Neil McCauley\u2014who (along with their tight-knit crews) find themselves on a violent collision course proved exceptionally inspirational, not only on-screen, but off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Numerous cases of real-life robberies across the world, including, most famously, the 1997 Bank of America assault that led to the exceptionally bloody North Hollywood Shootout<\/a>, had used the film as a guideline. This is not to say that Heat<\/em> bears a shred of responsibility for those crimes, but simply to recognize how great a nerve it touched not only with general audiences and film nerds, but the real-life criminal underworld. That\u2019s as high a praise as a crime flick can get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for as successful as the movie was upon release, it would take a little longer for the larger cinematic landscape to catch up, though catch up it did. Today, there is no shortage of bastard children of Heat<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While there may be other, earlier examples, the first big movie to pay obvious homage to Mann\u2019s film was Christopher Nolan\u2019s mega-comic book blockbuster, The Dark Knight<\/em> (2008). Its instantly iconic opening introduces Heath Ledger\u2019s Joker by way of a daring daytime bank robbery that moves with the same clockwork precision as Heat\u2019s greatest set piece. (It also features Heat<\/em> cast member William Fitchner in a small but key role.) The rest of The Dark Knight<\/em> adopts Heat\u2019s<\/em> blue-gray, glass and concrete aesthetic, while the \u201cflipside to that coin\u201d dynamic between Batman and The Joker takes a lot from Pacino-De Niro\u2019s relationship. Given how massive a pop cultural juggernaut The Dark Knight<\/em> turned out to be, it\u2019s hard not to credit it with kicking off the spate of would-be Heats<\/em> (as well as directing audiences who were either very young or not yet born in 1995 to the original).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years later, once and future Batman Ben Affleck would put his own Southie spin on Mann with The Town<\/em> (2010). Homing in on the romance subplot of Heat<\/em>, Affleck plays the soulful leader of a crew of top-shelf heist men who falls for a former hostage, insinuating himself into her life while planning to take down the ultimate score by robbing Fenway Park. The Kevlar-clad climactic shootout in that film\u2014which spills out onto the streets of Beantown in broad daylight\u2014is pretty much beat-for-beat the same as in Heat<\/em>, though Affleck does his best to imbue a few small, personal quirks into it (Jeremy Renner\u2019s loose cannon triggerman taking a sip from a discarded soda cup right before getting popped is a nice touch).<\/p>\n\n\n\n As successful as both The Dark Knight<\/em> and The Town<\/em> proved, it would be another half decade before the floodgates truly opened. In 2016, Aussie director John Hillcoat released Triple 9<\/em>, about a team of Russian mob-connected crooked cops and professional criminals who plan to murder an honest cop as a distraction for a major heist. While the look and feel of the film is more immediately reminiscent of the washed-out filters and macho posturing of a David Ayer joint, the bank heist, highway shootout and storage facility assault that bookend it are pure Mann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of bookends, the year 2018 saw four Heat<\/em> homages open and close out the theatrical calendar. The first was Den of Thieves<\/em>, a Gerard Butler vehicle that swaps out the towering office buildings, corporate suites, chic nightclubs, and \u201cdead-tech, post-modernistic bullshit houses\u201d of DTLA and San Fernando Valley for the flat, desolate, sunburnt streets and suburban tract homes of East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley. It also trades Mann\u2019s stoic, existentialist ennui for a dirtbag, muscle headed machismo. Den of Thieves<\/em> truly is the dumb man\u2019s Heat<\/em>\u2014which is not meant as an insult, because goddamn if it also isn\u2019t the best of its bastard bunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much the same can be said for Craig S. Zahler\u2019s knowingly reactionary Dragged Across Concrete, <\/em>which came out in September of that year. That film\u2019s plot\u2013about two crooked cops plotting to rip off a gang of terrifyingly vicious bank robbers\u2013is very much its own weird beast, but the aesthetics of its set pieces and costume design, as well as its lengthy runtime (something it shares with Den<\/em>) feels of a piece with Mann\u2019s film. (Heat\u2019s<\/em> subplot about Dennis Haysbert\u2019s doomed ex-con getaway driver also would seem to be a huge influence on Dragged\u2019s<\/em> story.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tail end of 2018, meanwhile, saw two far more interesting-on-paper, but ultimately disappointing Heat<\/em> homages that put a feminine twist on their tried and tested narratives: Steve McQueen\u2019s Widows <\/em>(a feature-length adaptation of an early \u201880s British television drama of the same name) and Karyn Kusama\u2019s Destroyer<\/em>. The former picks up where Heat<\/em> leaves off, following the bereaved wives and girlfriends of a crew of deceased Chicago bank robbers as they plan to rip off a corrupt politician while also outmaneuvering a powerful mobster. The latter is a smaller character study about a Hannah-esque L.A. detective (Nicole Kidman) suffering burnout while attempting to take down a cult-like crew of armed robbers with whom she had previously spent time undercover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, for as fresh a spin as the respective films come with, they each succumb to sloppy and turgid plotting, boring action sequences, and distractingly showy (but hollow) performances from their lead actors. Whereas Den of Thieves<\/em> revels in its hungover sleaziness, much to the delight of its steadily growing cult of admirers, both Widows<\/em> and Destroyer<\/em> boast pretensions of profundity that end up sinking them because of how thuddingly obvious they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Den-of-Thieves-1024x576.jpg\")
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