Heist (2001)

When "Heist" first came out, I was hoping that it would have all those Mamet touches that had surprised me so much in "House of Games", "Homicide", and even "The Spanish Prisoner".It did, but maybe it also 'cracks out of turn". This time I could anticipate the twists.Mamet regulars Rebecca Pigeon and Ricky Jay are joined by Gene Hackman as Joe Moore, the head of a crew of jewel thieves. He takes on a big heist for his difficult partner Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito), but he has been identified on a previous job and is saddled with Bergman's impulsive son. "Heist" continues David Mamet's fascination with long and short cons, tells, marks and grifts. But like Joe Moore, Mamet has been made from a previous job and now we are ready for him - we've ramped up our security.The film has a better first half and looks good. It also has a pacey score by Theodore Shapiro that helps drive it forward. The big plus is Gene Hackman, his presence here makes up for shortcomings in other areas, especially the end. It also has Rebecca Pidgeon, her style takes some getting used to, but that watchfulness and reserve gives her an enigmatic quality - she steals scenes.Half the people in Mamet's films are cool - the others are marks. That controlling self-assurance verging on smugness worked well in "House of Games" but it gets a bit stretched here - it was definitely overstretched in "Spartan".The film is loaded with distinctive Mamet speech patterns and rhythms - there are plenty of lines with a twist throughout the film - "My motherf#*ker's so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him"."Heist" does have tension, but in the end it paints itself into a corner and opts for a "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" resolution. "Heist" came out around the same time as "The Score" with Robert DeNiro. They were both heist films with attitude. "The Score" works better. Director Frank Oz had a light touch and "The Score" has wit and even empathy for its characters. To be honest, these are elements missing from "Heist" - it's cynical and it's clever, and there is irony, but humour can be the crucial difference in a movie such as this.If you are expecting a "House of Games" or a "Homicide", "Heist" just doesn't get there, however it has its moments before it simply runs out of puff.

Written and directed by David Mamet, this superior crime thriller begins with a brilliantly choreographed jewellery-store robbery that demonstrates just how professional and skilled the team of thieves are. The obviously high level of trust and understanding that they share, enable them to cope when things don't go exactly as planned and to improvise well whenever the need arises. The pace and precision of what happens in these opening scenes is impressive and intriguing and sets the tone for everything that follows. Numerous plot twists, double-crosses and humorous moments then add to the fun as the plot becomes increasingly complicated and the gang have to cope with some unexpected challenges.When veteran thief and gang-leader Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) accidentally has his picture captured on a security camera during a high-value jewellery robbery, he knows that the most sensible course of action is to retire immediately and head south on his boat with his much younger wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon). He encounters a problem, however, when his fence and financial backer Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito) opposes the plan because he's already invested a large sum of money in setting up the gang's next job. Bergman isn't willing to make any concessions and withholds the gang's share of the proceeds of the robbery to force them into carrying out "the Swiss thing"."The Swiss thing" turns out to be an extremely dangerous but highly lucrative robbery of a huge shipment of gold from a Swiss cargo plane. To make matters worse, however, the distrustful Bergman stipulates that his nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell) has to go along as one of the gang to ensure that they go ahead with the heist exactly as planned. Silk is young, inexperienced and impulsive and also has designs on Fran. He sees Joe as an old guy who's losing his grip and soon starts to think of how he could get away with both the gold and the girl.Joe feels compelled to go ahead with the gold heist and although he has complete faith in the loyalty and professionalism of his right-hand man Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo) and his diversionary expert Pinky (Ricky Jay), the on-going presence of Jimmy Silk continues to be a source of great concern even after the ambitious heist has been successfully carried out.David Mamet's style of direction is perfect for this material as he brings great coherence and momentum to the intricate plot and his dialogue, as usual, is sharp, witty and quite unique. Some clever quips and brilliant banter illuminate the exchanges between the main characters but the usual formality and stilted nature of Mamet's lines are less apparent in this movie, possibly due to the presence of Gene Hackman. His skillful delivery is so warm and natural that it makes even the most contrived phrases sound quite spontaneous and his interactions with Delroy Lindo are a real highlight. Both actors excel in this movie as do Ricky Jay and Danny DeVito who also make their characters very real.The high quality of the direction, the writing and the acting ensure that a higher-then-average rating is merited but what's probably even more impressive is the way in which Mamet has taken a very simple and familiar plot and developed it into an enjoyable thriller that actually gets better with each repeat viewing. In the case of "Heist", once is definitely not enough.

Plot: A master-thief pulls one last heist whilst trying to betray his bossThis is pure Mamet: razor-sharp dialogue full of unexplained (but understandable) jargon, meaty characters played by a well- chosen cast, simple but highly effective direction, and so many twists, betrayals and reverses that the story peaks too early and becomes slightly exhausting. It is more intellectually intriguing - Mamet actually comes up with a genuinely fresh heist - than emotionally involving but it is gripping nonetheless; this is because Mamet, unlike most Hollywood writers, actually understands tension and tight plotting. Much like Michael Mann, he's interested in how professionals work and a lot of the fun is seeing how everything is done. A nice slick little crime drama.

The film is literally about a group of people who know exactly how to communicate and collaborate without even having to confer by speaking, confronted with a newcomer who doesn't speak that language at all, and probably couldn't to save his life, but they're nevertheless forced to deal with him. Mamet's twists aren't just "twists." They work at this fundamental level, for instance as they all work right under our noses to rid themselves early in the game of this unexpected liability, how every character knows what the other really means and implicitly goes along with it lock, stock and barrel. This greenhorn, in all seriousness, expresses his guileless lack of understanding of what would ordinarily be expected to be meant, let alone the real situation as regards to him. Later on, when chance comes back to bite them, leader of the pack takes a moment to think, then gives them tasks. His number two guy asks where he's going with this, to which he just replies, "Just listen." They often nod to each other from a distance and no one else sees. We've seen this done a lot, but not in this way too often: What is the idea that one is communicating that the other immediately acts upon? Hackman plays Joe "Cute as a Chinese Baby" Moore, a thief whose real passion is building boats. His crew comprises Bobby ("You know why the chicken crossed the road? 'Cause the road crossed the chicken.") and Pincus ("He's so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him."), and Joe's wife Fran, who "could talk her way out of a sunburn." They pull a big job, with one snag: Joe's face on security camera. Time to tow anchor and aim for ports, but not as per Mickey Bergman, who forces Joe into One Last Job, and insists he include his incompetent nephew Jimmy Silk, the sort of madcap who packs a gun in an unsafe neighborhood which wouldn't be that if he left.The plot progresses through tangled altitudes of deception. Mamet adores magic, namely trickery, and this plot, like The Spanish Prisoner and House of Games, is a spectrum that refracts various realities conditional on how you're slanted at a given time. It also includes ample loads of criminal art, as in the minutiae of the opening diamond heist, and the way they appropriate gold ingots from a cargo plane later on.Some critics disliked the particulars I loved most. We learn from professional opinion-pushers that some climactic gunplay could've profited from more stylized treatment, which is amazingly unwise. Are they suggesting they would've favored one of those according-to-Hoyle automated gunfights we're tired of after innumerable overhauls? What I love about this climactic gunfight is the way some of the characters are clumsy and uncomfortable. This is perhaps their first gunfight. DeVito skips into the line of fire frantically, "Let's just talk!" Earlier, you suddenly find a violent confrontation breaking out between Delroy Lindo and a few of DeVito's heavies, and then going right back to trying to talk things out, right out of the building. The care with which Hackman says, "He ain't gonna shoot me? Then he hadn't oughta point a gun at me. It's insincere." And the typical exactness of this exchange: "Hey, I'll be as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton." "I don't want you as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton. I want you as quiet as an ant not even thinking about pissing on cotton." I'm also confused by why critics harass Rebecca Pidgeon. Yes, she has a distinguishing delivery which is well-matched with Mametized dialogue: terse, abrupt, informal. Mamet enjoys creating anachronisms for her like when Joe says, "Nobody lives forever," and with pure deadpan she replies, "Frank Sinatra gave it a shot." She's not meant as a graceful classic noir succubus, though her character doesn't mind seizing that opportunity, but as a gutsy Anybodys sort who can't entirely be trusted. Mamet bothers to provide us with technique and inventiveness, and is criticized by professionals because his work doesn't come from an automated press.Hackman is naturally a connoisseur at gristly, graying veterans and, oddly, has been throughout his career. He and Lindo make a home in their roles so effortlessly facing twists and double-crosses with down-to-earth authenticity. A makeshift rapport that assures us they've collaborated for quite a long time and are like-minded on all that counts, their knowing abbreviation is like an old stand-up's slang, guiding our interest away from the ruse. And DeVito is one of the most unfailingly amusing actors in American cinema, with an oomph that makes his dialogue throb. "I've just financialized the numbers," he rationalizes. He's not a bad guy here, simply an unethical capitalist glutton with risky affiliations.And one may wonder why Pidgeon's Fran would do what she does after the truck collision, but it's because we can't be certain whether her final surprise is really her final surprise. And the film closes with one of the great movie smiles, maybe a little more at us than what's transpired. And we smile back, cheek to cheek, because it's still self-contained: This character knows the final surprise is not the final surprise. Heist is the brand of caper film that came before special effects supplanted sharpness, structure and dialogue. This movie is comprised of natural ingredients, not manufactured goods. With both heists, at the beginning and in the middle, major stakes are raised, because in spite of its practically record-setting amount of plot twists, it's about its characters.