Supporting Victims: Joel Fuernsinn, Sean Marston, Tom Crowley
Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) says, "I try to think of a guy smarter than me
then I ask myself, 'What would he do?'" Of course, this kind of analysis
can lend itself to more than a little overthinking and that's exactly the
problem with this movie. David Mamet, both writer and director, must have tried
to think of a movie watcher smarter than himself and asked himself, "How
can I fool them?" What we get in Heist is a mediocre rehash of a series of
different movies that collapses under its own cleverness about halfway through
and never really recovers.
Heist is about Joe and his gang of thieves. Joe's trying to retire and get out
of the biz after being "burnt" at his last heist - caught on video
camera because he refused to shoot someone who didn't get around to drinking her
drugged coffee in a timely fashion. His problem is that the backer, Bergman
(Danny DeVito), has double-crossed him and refuses to pay Joe the agreed upon
amount and wants him to do the "Swiss job" instead. he also insists
that his wet-behind-the-ears cousin, Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell) attends the
heist, ostensibly to learn from Joe. Joe and his wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon) try
first to get the money another way but when that falls through, Joe and his gang
have to take on the Swiss job. Delroy Lindo and Ricky Jay play Bobby and
Pinky, the other two members of Joe's aging gang and add a lot of dynamic and camaraderie
to the mix.
This is the One Last Job-Mission Impossible-Film Noir-The
Sting mix of a movie. Unfortunately, we've seen this kind of movie before
and while watching those movies was surprising and exciting the first time, the
mixed-parentage descendant Heist definitely lacks any of those qualities here.
Not that this film is unwatchable. The actors do a superlative job with their
lines and characters. Their good acting makes Joe and his pals a group
with a complex and practiced chemistry. You do believe that they really have
been working together a long time and are ready to retire. There are one or two
funny lines that are worth remembering but the dialogue seems very forced at
times. However, with a title like Heist, the main focus of the movie will not be
about the characters or the dialogue but about the process of theft and the
inevitable double-crossing (honor among thieves?). This is where the movie fails
horribly.
Basically, the movie violates the Rule of One - the one allowance of incredulity
that we give to each and every movie that we watch. We can accept that a
character is able to anticipate the first "fly in the ointment" and
have a backup plan ready. We don't buy that a character anticipates the 4th and
5th "bad thing that goes wrong". Even Mission
Impossible (the intelligent TV series, not the silly movies that claim the
name but not the spirit) at its most improbable, had its characters working on
alternate solutions on the fly to solve something new that came up. But even
this acute precognition of Joe would have been tolerable if the main heist
itself was believably executed or filmed. If the scenes had been paced
differently or the plan had been a little more plausible or even interesting, it
might have been a more enjoyable movie. Instead it plods along with the
certainty of a classic Superman comic book. Sure someone will throw kryptonite
at the Man of Steel but somehow it all kind of works out in the end. Ho
hum.
We give Heist a 6 out of 10 on the Good Movie Scale. It's a cut above mediocre
because it's reasonably acted by the principals. We also give Heist a 5 out of
10 on the Bad Movie Scale because of some good one-liners and some spots of
really bad dialogue. It might be worth watching if you're easily surprised or
are able to turn off your brain when you step into a movie.
