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Directed by Fabio W. Silva , Zack Matthews

They messed with the wrong man's daughter.

Yuri, a retired special forces agent, is reluctantly forced into utilizing his old skills when his daughter, Julia, gets kidnapped by a human trafficking conglomerate just days before Christmas in Miami.

Oleg Prudius Olivier Richters Luis Da Silva Jr. Shannon Murray Oscar Corbella Gabriela Wong Eli Jeffree Zen Víctor González Tim Malcolm Yauhen Brasaus Roy Lynam

Directors Directors

Fabio W. Silva Zack Matthews

Writers Writers

Derek Garrison Andrej Kukoljac

Alternative Titles

迈阿密出击, Sequestro em Miami

Thriller Crime Action

Releases by Date

01 mar 2021, theatrical limited, 05 nov 2021, 09 nov 2021, releases by country.

• Premiere Berlin Film Festival
• Theatrical limited LA

85 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Spearhafoc 1

Barely even a movie.

Review by Internal_Star ★

They for real stole from the Payday 2 soundtrack and tried to make it their own with extra beats and slowed some parts down for "dramatic" effect.

Review by bunnyhero

i think we watched the wrong movie.

Review by doppelgangerdev ★★

You know if you get past the wonky sound design, awful music, stunted acting, often poorly choreographed fights and shootouts and the fact that it's a Taken clone in the 2020s... you still don't have a good movie. But I appreciate what they're going for and I hope they make more. It does have some nice color, occasionally creative shots and for its budget a few ambitious bits even if the execution leaves something to be desired. And c'mon any film where a dude's head gets squished by a hydraulic car lift ain't all bad. In fact they liked the gag enough to do it twice!

Floridaflix rating - crime and vibrant colors galore. Gags about Miami Heat players. Uninspired crime boss though. Could've done more there. This is Miami, give me a real south Florida sicko. But did get lots of night neon and everybody has a gun and can't shoot.

Rating: Florida enough.

Review by Kai Ogawa

All set up just to make a joke about Mario Chalmers. Oleg is great though and he kicks ass.

Review by Woden1216

Mario Chalmers punching air right now

Review by DFvideodiary

Giant wrestler/mechanic Oleg Prudius channels Leo Fong while stomping sex traffic mobsters who done stole his daughter = Cheap TAKEN (2008) rip-off with hilarious/awful fights and acting and a rancid soundtrack that won't STFU. Amazing. And recommended.

Review by bunyeezus ½

Mix of Miami Vice and Heat

Review by Pedro Lessa ★★★★★

É HEAT CULTURE QUE O BOSTON CELTICS VÁ À BOSTA

Review by Conor ½

I'm fairly sure the music for this film was chosen by someone who has A: never seen this film And B: possibly never seen any film at all.

Ok, this is in the category I think of as "Barely a movie."

I'll usually sit through stuff nearly this bad for cool action sequences, but the action here:

Is very slow Tries to mask poor choreography/lack of rehearsal by:

A lot of cuts, sometimes more than one shot for a single punch

Foley, trying to fill in with weirdly-chosen sound effects when punches whiff by about a foot away from their target.

Did I mention it's very, very slow.

Review by Ryan Aston ½

Letterboxd doesn't have a ZERO STAR rating. Please rectify this

Review by SekaiAC ★

still better than LeBron

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Miami Heat Reviews

No All Critics reviews for Miami Heat.

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Twenty-Five Years Later, ‘Heat’ Is Still the Juice

A meeting of two legends, an iconic ode to L.A., and a perfect heist thriller

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There is a moment in Heat that’s been living rent-free in my head for 25 years. It’s not one of the famous ones, of which there are plenty. Think of the opening glimpse of an urban rail train slowly coming into focus through plumes of smoke, its approaching headlights holding the audience in thrall. Or the closing tableau of Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna standing victorious (or is he?) over the body of his professional nemesis and spiritual sibling Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), as the city flickers indifferently in the distance.

But the image I’m thinking of comes in the chaos of the brutal mid-film shoot-out between Vincent’s and Neil’s cops-and-robbers crews—a 10-minute set piece that’s like an entire action movie in miniature, exploding all of Heat ’s simmering tensions in a hail of semiautomatic gunfire. Acting on a tip from one of their quarry’s disgruntled ex-confederates, Vincent and his LAPD robbery/homicide squad members ambush Neil’s team during a daring daylight bank robbery. As the bullets start flying, Vincent’s partner Bosko (Ted Levine) is hit and falls to the ground. Rushing toward the body, Vincent looks down and we get a shot of Levine lying prone and staring, his green eyes wild and frozen in sightless surprise. Vincent moves on, but a question lingers: How did a man who knew exactly what he was signing up for not see it coming?

Like no other Hollywood filmmaker of his vintage, Michael Mann is entrenched as an existentialist. The life-and-death stakes in his films are partially a by-product of the crime movie genre, with its lethal rituals of violence and reprisal. But in lieu of weightless escapism, the Chicago-born director pursues a sense of gravitas that bypasses melodrama for something more ephemeral. At his best—and a case can be made that Heat is Mann at his best—Mann’s movies feel cosmic. If Mann’s great theme is compulsion to live dangerously, he’s hardly shy about contemplating the consequences.

Mann is serious, but he’s also a show-off. One reason that he’s been so canonized by academics and auteurists alike is that his muscular-yet-mystical storytelling technique—relentless forward momentum punctuated by philosophical pauses—almost always calls attention to itself. Ditto the director’s embrace of digital formats, which he has used not in service of seamless illusion, à la the invisible CGI suturing of David Fincher, but to deconstruct and reimagine the visual syntax of multiplex action movies. Heat was shot on crisp 35 mm film, and it’s a beautiful-looking movie, but its follow-ups have been suspended between clarity and murk; think of the neon rainbows of Collateral , or Miami Vice , with its screen-saver skies. That this aesthetic transition from calculated, classical slickness to a blurry immediacy hasn’t really changed the substance of Mann’s work speaks to the consistency of his world view. Whatever lens he’s looking through, he always sees the same things.

What Mann’s movies perceive most acutely is the dilemma of professionalism—a contradiction dating back to his 1981 feature debut, Thief . There, James Caan’s master safecracker tried to extricate himself from a life of crime despite his genius-level proficiency at its dark arts. Instead of imposing or inviting judgment on a character, Mann emphasized the inherent value of a job well done, and exalted his hero’s refusal to let his gifts be subordinated or exploited by gangsters whose brute-force operations are analogous to corporate capitalism. It’s no coincidence that the two most hateful characters in Heat are William Fichtner’s white-collar money launderer Roger Van Zant and Kevin Gage’s perverse serial killer Waingro, nor that they end up forging an unlikely alliance. Waingro’s explanation for wasting two helpless cops and compromising an otherwise precise heist—a mistake that sets the movie’s plot in motion—is “I had to get it on.” If there’s anything that Mann despises more than cynical expediency, it’s sloppiness.

De Niro’s performance in Heat is a model of composure—the title of the book we see him reading, Stress Fractures in Titanium , encapsulates his unflappability. Pacino is more voluble, operating in the same realm of borderline self-parody as The Devil’s Advocate but yoking his flamboyance smartly to the demands of the role. Whenever Vincent flies off the handle, it’s always shown to be purposeful—as the coping mechanism of a put-upon, possibly coked-up cop . Depending on the situation, Vincent is willing to go by the book or to throw it away. It’s no surprise that critics riding Mann’s wavelength, as well as detractors skeptical of his legend, are equally primed to size up his studies of weirdo, alpha-male ascetics—from FBI profilers ( Manhunter ), to boxers ( Ali ), to contract killers ( Collateral ), to freelance hackers ( Blackhat )—as distinct brush strokes in some collective painting of directorial self-portraiture.

The pathos in Mann’s movies—including and especially Heat —comes from the impossibility of reconciling individual excellence with conventional forms of security and fulfillment. This lone-wolf archetype gets effectively doubled in Heat , which was sold as an unprecedented summit of two ranking New Hollywood icons. The coffee date between Neil and Vincent— which, amazingly, was never rehearsed prior to shooting —is exactly as intense and enjoyable as you remember, heightened by Mann’s choice to cut exclusively between over-the-shoulder close-ups, as if the characters were reluctant to share the frame. The point of the scene, of course, is that Vincent and Neil are mirror images of one another, virtuoso workaholics in trades with life-or-death stakes. There’s a comic-book aspect to their rivalry, which may be why Christopher Nolan cribbed so much from Heat in his Batman movies. The difference is that where The Dark Knight strives to give its globally recognized icons a human dimension, Heat makes a couple of guys having a cup of coffee into myth.

Heat ’s pulpy grandeur stems not only from Mann’s characteristic formalism: his serene, lyrical establishing shots and his hyperbolic use of color to delineate psychological states. It’s also a testament to his instincts as a city filmmaker. With respect to Pacino and De Niro, if Heat deserved an acting Oscar, it would be for Los Angeles playing itself. Shooting in and around America’s most widely photographed city, Mann insisted on locations that had only rarely (or never) been used before. The result is a movie that evokes an entire history of L.A.-based procedurals without ever replicating them. If it’s possible for a film to feel simultaneously specific and nondescript, Heat ’s topography of lonely off-ramps, glowing industrial towers, and rusted metal shipping containers is like wasteland vérité. Even the most chic and luxurious spaces are made strange by Mann’s belief in a steely, unvarnished realism. When Vincent catches his wife, Justine (Diane Venora), cheating on him with a stranger named Ralph (Xander Berkeley), he’s seemingly less aggrieved by her infidelity than that he has to come home to her “ex-husband’s dead-tech, postmodernistic bullshit house” in order to deal with it.

“When do you finally want to buy furniture?” cracks Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) upon waking up broke and hungover on the floor in Neil’s spartan beachfront residence—a question that, like so much of the dialogue in Heat , pops the hood on the sequence’s subtexts about literal and figurative emptiness. “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner,” Neil tells his pal, a dictum that apparently extends to couches. (A shot of a gun being placed on a glass table quotes the Canadian painter Alex Colville’s 1967 masterpiece Pacific while indicating the extent of Neil’s material possessions.) The common denominator between Vincent and Neil is their commitment-phobic approach to personal relationships—their need to build themselves escape hatches.

But Chris, who’s played by Kilmer in a wonderfully weird performance that’s almost a parody of broodingly handsome fuck-ups, is defined by his devotion to his wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd). Heat surrounds both of its protagonists with figures who serve as liabilities to their respective enterprises—women and children, mostly, with Vincent growing ever more protective of his stepdaughter Lauren (Natalie Portman). Neil, meanwhile, is threatened not only by his emerging romance with Amy Brenneman’s Eady—a newcomer to L.A. who explains on a first date that graphic design is her passion—but also by Charlene through the proxy of Chris. There is a strange, troubling scene where Neil confronts Charlene about her extramarital affair and basically threatens her to stay with her compulsive-gambler husband until he’s completed one last big score or else. Even though we know De Niro is playing an antihero, there’s something unsettling about the character’s willingness to intimidate and instrumentalize the people around him that complicates his romantic self-conception as a lone wolf. It’s one thing to live by an ascetic, samurai-like code of self-preservation; it’s another to try to impose those standards on everybody else.

Heat ’s sprawling plot is filled with poetic coincidences, like having Waingro revealed as the serial killer Vincent has been trailing since long before the film begins; when Neil kills Waingro in retribution for screwing up his operation (and selling him out to Van Zant), he’s unknowingly doing his pursuer’s work for him (yet another of the script’s doubling motifs). The structure piles on tragedies, like the subplot about a sympathetic ex-con (Dennis Haysbert) whose recidivism gets him killed out of nowhere. By the time Vincent is rushing Lauren to the hospital after a suicide attempt, the three-hour running time feels more like a compressed minseries—which is actually true enough.

Mann originally wrote the script for Heat in 1979, integrating the experiences and anecdotes of a Chicago-based cop named Chuck Adamson. His 16-year odyssey to get the movie made suggests a deeply personal investment in the material. Mann’s 1989 television movie L.A. Takedown was conceived as a TV pilot for NBC following the success of Miami Vice. If you watch it now, you can see the narrative and thematic outlines of Heat: the Vincent-Neil rivalry, the laserlike focus on police procedure, the loose-cannon Waingro subplot (with the character played by Xander Berkeley), a big shoot-out that brings together all the different plot threads. What’s missing, though—besides a $60 million budget and two gigantic movie stars—is the grandiloquent passion of the movie version.

Nobody who loves Heat can deny that it’s pretentious. It’s very pretentious: For the final showdown between Pacino and De Niro, Mann uses Moby’s meditative, synth-driven “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters,” a title that expressly reflects the director’s metaphysical aspirations. The song competes for space on the soundtrack with the thundering of jets overhead as Neil and Vincent stalk each other one last time on the tarmac at LAX, a backdrop symbolizing departure and freedom—the latter paradoxically achieved by Neil going out on his own terms.

“Brother, you are going down,” Vincent had told Neil earlier in the diner. The greatness of Mann’s ending is that it fulfills the lethal part of Pacino’s prophecy while making us feel everything implied in that biblical word “brother.” Just because we can see the finale coming doesn’t make it any less devastating. The inevitability is part of the shock. The pretentiousness is the point. The action is the juice. The movie is the best.

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Currently available on 12 streaming services.

Miami Heat (2021)

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A retired Spetsnaz agent relies on his old skills to save his beloved daughter, who has been kidnapped while working in South Beach.

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Yuri, a retired special forces agent, is reluctantly forced into utilizing his old skills when his daughter, Julia, gets kidnapped by a human trafficking conglomerate just days before Christmas in Miami.

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How Heat 2 connects to Michael Mann's other films, too

Billed as a prequel and sequel to Heat, the director's new novel also connects to his other films in various thematic and aesthetic ways.

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

Michael Mann 's first novel is out this week, and it is billed as both a prequel and sequel to his most popular film. The title is simple enough: Heat 2 . But though the book (co-written with crime novelist Meg Gardiner) catches readers up with what memorable Heat characters like Al Pacino 's Vincent Hanna and Val Kilmer 's Chris Shiherlis were doing both in the years before and after the events of the 1995 L.A. crime saga, it also interweaves with ideas and themes from several other Mann films as well.

Here are all the references we found!

Mann was born and raised in Chicago, and you can still hear the accent in his voice when he gives interviews. His first few films were set there and were suffused with the Windy City's specific flavor of crime. Thief surrounded star James Caan with real-life cops and criminals from Chicago (some of whom, like Dennis Farina, went on to have full-fledged acting careers) and thus imbued its story of high-stakes diamond theft with a lived-in authenticity that Mann has brought to his subsequent projects.

Heat is famously set in L.A., where Mann has lived for decades, but it is based on real-life cops and criminals from Chicago. The real-life bank robber Neil McCauley (whose name went unchanged for Robert De Niro's screen portrayal) was killed by real-life Chicago cop Chuck Adamson (the loose basis for Hanna) in 1964. In keeping with this history, the sections of Heat 2 that take place before the events of the film are mostly set in Chicago. Readers see Hanna working as a detective there in the late '80s, tracking down a serial rapist and home burglar named Otis Wardell — and don't worry, the plot ends up providing a pretty satisfying explanation for why Hanna eventually left the city and ended up in L.A.

Before that, we're treated to inside knowledge of Chicago policing and politics — Hanna dismissively notes that his superior officer doesn't care about catching Wardell so much as "he cares about greasing the machine: Cook County, city hall, the CPD brass, or the Outfit machine" — and lots of local history. At one point, Hanna ponders how his family started as "immigrants from Lombardy who came to work the accessible clay deposits into bricks and the stone left standing when the glaciers slid by to the east."

The Insider

The Insider is an interesting outlier in Mann's filmography. Like many of his films, it portrays expert criminals and the professionals tasked with stopping them. But instead of cops chasing bank robbers, The Insider is about hard-nosed journalists digging up the secrets that tobacco corporations hid from the public. Pacino stars as 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, while Russell Crowe plays former tobacco executive-turned-whistleblower, Jeffrey Wigand.

If you're familiar with that film, there's a moment in Heat 2 that will make you smile. In the wake of the botched bank robbery depicted in Heat , Chris Shiherlis flees L.A. and ends up in South America with a new alias: "Jeffrey Bergman," a portmanteau of The Insider protagonists' names.

But there's also another connection. The opening scene of The Insider finds Bergman blindfolded in the back of a van, being escorted through Lebanon in order to secure an interview between his star reporter and the leader of Hezbollah. When Chris ends up in a Paraguayan free trade zone called Ciudad del Este in Heat 2 , he remarks that Hezbollah fighters are one of the main groups to have immigrated to the City of the East and he often notices Lebanese people around the city.

Fans of the Miami Vice TV series were understandably disappointed when the 2006 film version replaced the flashy cars and Italian suits with a grimy, documentary-style look at international crime in the age of globalized neoliberalism. But fans who have come to regard the Miami Vice movie as an underrated masterpiece will be excited to know that Mann is still very interested in this topic, and even describes it in much the same way.

Over the course of Miami Vice , what first seems like a simple undercover drug smuggling operation becomes a window into a breathtakingly complex international cartel that traffics not just drugs but guns, technology, and all kinds of other goods. When reporting their finds to superiors, Miami detectives Crockett ( Colin Farrell ) describes the castle's leader Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar) as "the new news." When Chris Shiherlis comes face to face with the reality of Ciudad del Este, where everything's for sale and crime is just business, he describes this end-of-history every-man-for-himself environment as "the new new."

That's not the only similarity between Crockett and Chris. Employed by the Liu crime family in Ciudad del Este, Chris falls for the brilliant Ana Liu — whose tactical genius and intuitive understanding of the new economy are overlooked by her patriarchal father in favor of her party boy brother. Chris and Ana are not a match meant to last — he will eventually have to return to the family he abandoned in L.A. at the end of Heat , while she can't date the hired muscle when an arranged match could bring her family greater power — but that makes their connection even more romantic. As Ana says to Chris, since their relationship has "no future," there is "nothing to worry about" in terms of connecting too deeply. That's almost exactly the same exchange Crockett and Isabella (Gong Li) have while pondering their own love affair in Miami Vice .

Does Chris and Ana's love affair end up any better than theirs? We won't spoil it. You'll just have to read Heat 2 for yourself.

In the midst of Heat 2 's publication, Mann is currently filming Ferrari with Adam Driver in Italy. This is exciting news for the director's fans because when released, Ferrari will be his first feature film in almost a decade. Seven years ago, Blackhat flopped hard at the box office, but not before delivering a further exploration of the international crime depicted in Miami Vice .

Except that by 2015, Mann understood that big-money robberies no longer take the form of urban shootouts between cops and gangsters. Now it happens on the internet, with even further global reach. Heat 2 's chronology ends in 2000, several years removed from the era of the hacker named Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), but it reflects the global rise of computer technology and Asian economies that are both so central to Blackhat .

The connective tissue between the two stories is Kelso, the computer expert played by Tom Noonan in Heat . He shows up again in Heat 2 to help Chris and Ana with their cybersecurity, and Chris reflects that Kelso is always "ahead of the curve" — much like Mann himself.

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