L.A. Takedown

Made for television and directed by Michael Mann, L.A. Takedown follows obsessive Los Angeles detective Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) as he and his team attempt to capture a notorious criminal named Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur). L.A. Takedown was famously remade for the big screen in 1995 as (the far superior) Heat, and it’s nevertheless rather surprising to note just how many similarities there are between the two movies – with Mann including many of the same characters, action beats, and even chunks of dialogue here. (The diner tête-à-tête in Heat, for example, contains an almost word-for-word similarity to L.A. Takedown‘s version of the sequence.) And although L.A. Takedown is about half the length of Heat, the movie feels so much longer and poorly-paced than its big-screen successor – as Mann, saddled with a roster of somewhat amateurish performers, generally proves unable to transform the film’s myriad of characters into wholeheartedly compelling figures. And while there’s a certain novelty to seeing iconic moments staged on a much smaller scale – Heat‘s epic gun battle emerges here as a far more low-key affair – L.A. Takedown is never able to garner any real momentum and the whole thing, for the most part, feels like a novelty item that’s best forgotten.

** out of ****