The 10 Best Heat Knockoffs, Including Crime 101, Ranked
If you were given the job of filling the distracted boyfriend’s thought bubble in that meme of the couple lying in bed, I think a safe bet would be to simply write “Michael Mann’s Heat.” No movie in the last 30 years has cast quite the same spell on the male psyche as Mann’s 1995 crime masterpiece, and at the rate that heist movies seem to be getting greenlit these days, no movie appears to have been so influential on the current generation of filmmakers.
Two months into 2026, we’ve already seen Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Netflix’s The Rip, a pretty decent Miami-set thriller that came with a serious helping of Michael Mann overtones; and now, with the recent release of Crime 101, we’ve got our first fully-fledged post-Heat movie of the year. If we also take into account David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank, which is scheduled for release this September, it feels like as good a time as any to round up the best Heat homages of the last three decades—which I’ve arranged below in ascending order.
Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Making up the numbers somewhat on our list of Mann impersonators is Guy Ritchie’s 2021 heist thriller Wrath of Man. Told over various interweaving timelines, this is a movie, in which Jason Statham plays a security guard out for revenge, that builds to a heist on Black Friday weekend.
As Mann impersonators go, Ritchie can’t boast the director’s icy cool aesthetics, but he did manage to get a good chunk of this movie shot in L.A., so there are definitely some Heat points for that. If you usually enjoy the vibe of Ritchie’s work on movies like Snatch or any of his other collaborations with Statham, you’ll probably have a pretty good time with it.
Frank Oz’s wonderfully entertaining 2001 movie The Score is probably better than some of the later movies on this list, but as it takes place in Montreal it’s not exactly trying to tick all those Heat boxes off.
What it does have is Robert De Niro as its central, honorable criminal—a guy so refined that he runs a jazz club in his downtime and has even managed to get Angela Bassett to fall in love with him. Bonus points here for delivering some Heat-style showdowns between legendary actors—both an up-and-coming Edward Norton (although his mimicking of a differently abled person has aged atrociously) and an on-the-way-out Marlon Brando, appearing here in his last ever role.
Check this one out if you’re partial to the classy crooks of movies like The Thomas Crown Affair or Ocean’s Eleven.
Ambulance is kind of what it might look like if Heat and Speed had a baby—and if that baby for some reason then had the energy of Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. The story follows a heist gone wrong—after which two thieves (played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) end up making a getaway (with a wounded hostage in tow) through the streets of Los Angeles, iconic storm drains included, in the vehicle from which the movie takes its ‘imaginative’ title.
All of which is to say: if you like a heist with a little more ‘Bayhem,’ this one delivers.
Granted, including Collateral (another Mann banger) on this list is kind of cheating. It’s also not really a heist movie, but this 2004 tale about a hitman, a cabbie and the fateful night they spend together, is such a quintessentially Michael Mann L.A. movie that I think it still warrants inclusion.
The driver here is the protagonist and is played by Jamie Foxx, but the movie is really the property of his co-star, Tom Cruise. If you like the actor’s work from that incredibly unhinged period (think movies like Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut), this is one you need to see.
To be fair, Crime 101 is not on the level of Collateral or The Score, but when it comes to straight-up Heat knockoffs—ie. movies about honourable criminals set in L.A. that feature robberies and car chases and brooding synth music—it really does tick all the boxes.
It also boasts a quite astonishing cast, with Chris Hemsworth (in Blackhat mode), Halle Berry (in overdue career comeback mode), Mark Ruffalo (in Task mode) and Barry Keoghan (in freaky weirdo mode) alongside Monica Barbera, and even Nick Nolte all on top form. It probably could do with being a little shorter and a little smarter, but it’s a solid, muscular, and well-acted crime movie that more than lives up to its title.
Inside Man is the kind of movie that makes me wish that filmmakers like Spike Lee would take the time to make more genre movies. The story, of course, is set in New York, but the movie’s style, pacing, characters and themes offer a delightful combination of Lee’s singular approach and Mann’s aesthetic DNA.
If you’re a fan of Lee’s work from those post-9/11 years (think The 25th Hour) you’re in for a treat.
The most surprisingly successful Heat impersonator of the last few years was easily Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves, a 4.5* heist flick (starring a never-better Gerard Butler) that looked, at first glance, like a straight-to-streaming movie.
There’s the dishonourable cop, the honorable robber, the moodily lit streets, the brooding music, the car chases, the cool lines of text before the opening title cards—Den of Thieves has it all and more.
Oh, and don’t sleep on Pantera—it might be slightly goofy, but this Riviera-set sequel is never less than entertaining.
I was in two minds as to whether I should include Ronin on this list. The 1998 Robert De Niro movie—which concerns an international group of thieves (Stellan Skarsgård and Jean Reno both feature) who are hired to steal a briefcase on, once again, the French Riviera—perhaps came a little too soon after Heat to really be considered an acolyte of Mann’s movie.
Whatever the case, it certainly arrived in Heat’s slipstream, following Mann’s near-spiritual approach to the crime genre and even bringing the samurai themes into the actual text of the story. If you vibed with both Heat and The Score, and appreciate a phenomenal car chase, you’ll love it.
It might have come 10 years after Ronin and taken place in Gotham City (and shot quite clearly in Chicago), but no movie in the last 30 years has done more to burnish the reputation of Mann's film than Cristopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
Just look at how Nolan directs the electric opening heist scene, the way that he lets the skyscrapers glisten, the way that Zimmer’s score throbs with brooding intensity. It’s Mann all over, and it knows it.
