L.A. Takedown (1989) I've watched Heat dozens of times to where I know the dialogue pretty well. This TV Movie is a failed Pilot for a series that was made after Heat called Robbery Homicide Division, and isn't the first time Mann has reworked the same material for both the large and small screen. 1986's Manhunter was an episode of Miami Vice called "Shadow in the Dark" (Season 3, Episode 6). On its own, this is a fairly terrible movie, but it works as one of the greatest DVD bonuses, a rough draft version of Heat.
Heat (1995) had 6 months of pre-production, and a 117 day shooting schedule. L.A. Takedown (1989) had 10 days of pre-production, and a 19 day shooting schedule. Michael Mann said that comparing one film to the other is like comparing "freeze dried coffee" to "Jamaican Blue Mountain".
Takedown is visually bare-bones, with a washed out look and sorely missing Mann's widescreen compositions. The acting is also varying degrees of terrible. The worst is Scott Plank in Al Pacino's role, though again it's so interesting to hear the same dialogue in the hands of this amateur doing a bad impression of young and cocky Ben Affleck and compare it to Pacino's over-sized inflections. (De Niro's role is by Alex McArthur, who isn't bad.) There are some familiar faces, including Michael Rooker, Daniel Baldwin and Xander Berkeley. Berkeley plays a different role in Heat. Here is chews it up as troublemaker Waingro.
Waingro was one of my big problems with Heat. (The other is the number of sub-plots, which this version doesn't have time for. So that's one point for Takedown.) If this crew is so professional, why did they allow a wild card, trigger happy punk into their group? Here, the bad guys aren't set up to be a superteam. They just mesh well and have a smart leader, but this particular combo seems to be fairly new. That makes the mistake of Waingro more plausible.
You get the expected lesser versions of Heat's classic scenes - the shootout, the coffee talk - but there are other scenes too, like the trap set to expose the cops. (
"These guys are good. You know what he's looking at? Us. We just got made") The two leads have their relationship dramas and some of the same interrogations proceed minus the epic frills, which only solidifies how strong the dialogue is. Some scenes take place in the same locations. This can be viewed as similar to a fan remaking a classic film, but coming from the original director (and editor) it holds a watchability that transcends all the low-budget badness.
Rating: ★ ★ ½