Heist
2001 Directed by David Mamet
Synopsis
Veteran thief, Joe Moore (Gene Hackman), is a pro who has done his last job. Now he just wants to get out of the business and sail off in to the sunset. But with his "fence", Bergman (Danny DeVito), holding back on the money from the last robbery, Joe and his team are not going anywhere - not until they pull off the mother of all heists. To ensure Moore and his team do the job his way, Bergman is sending his young, arrogant nephew, Jimmy Silk, to oversee it. With little respect and a thin veil of trust hanging over the job, pulling off the heist is the least of Moore's fears.
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This is Mamet unchained! There are a handful of writers working today that have such a distinct voice and style that you can tell who wrote the screenplay after only a couple of lines. Tarantino, Sorkin, and Mamet all come to mind. All also write mostly masculine, cut throat dialogue. Well I got news for you. Mamet script would make any of those other scripts its bitch. Mamet is as hardcore as it comes and he lets it all hang out in this film.
Heist is, believe it or not, a heist film. It is also, wait for it, a heist film that cons the viewer. Of course you know this going into a post modern heist film, so you…
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Things I learned from Heist:
1. To commit a robbery, once must always employ an explosion as distraction.
2. I should shave my fucking moustache. -
My motherfucker's so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him. Mamet's most quotable film this side of the "always be closing" scene.
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This is the first time I've felt Mamet wanted to be cool. Witty one-liners and comebacks that just stop scenes dead. An uneven Hackman so wonderful one moment, hesitant the next. The "one last job" that you're actually happy is the last job for its characters. It makes his SPARTAN triumph a few years later that much sweeter.
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With David Mamet directing from his own script and a cast including Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito and Sam Rockwell I had high expectations for Heist; expectations that it failed to live up too. The biggest problem is the script: it’s overly verbose and full of meaningless phrases repeated ad nauseam. At several points it came across as a parody of the slick heist film it was trying to be. Throw in plenty of pointless twists on top of twists and you end up with a needlessly convoluted plot that starts to fall apart at the seams.
By and large I think the cast do an admirable job with what they are given, but it’s too little to save a film that seems far too pleased with itself, without really having any good reason to be.
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Heist doesn't really add anything new to the heist film genre. It's got the typical "master thief wants to get out of the business, gets lured in, shenanigans occur" story. It's got your basic three-part story: setting up the heist, pulling off the heist, and the aftermath of the heist. It's got a bevy of alliance changes with nearly every character trying to double-cross the other characters at least one point in the film. So why did I enjoy it so much?
Well, the acting's really good for one. It's well-cast with Gene Hackman leading the show. There's good performances all around with Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon, and the almost-always immaculate Sam Rockwell. The dialogue is…
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This is the first time I've felt Mamet wanted to be cool. Witty one-liners and comebacks that just stop scenes dead. An uneven Hackman so wonderful one moment, hesitant the next. The "one last job" that you're actually happy is the last job for its characters. It makes his SPARTAN triumph a few years later that much sweeter.
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Great cast, and some good dialogue, but the film is generic as its title.
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My motherfucker's so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him. Mamet's most quotable film this side of the "always be closing" scene.
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Mamet, this time, doesn't get away with using a wading pool of thin characters in simulated overuse of the signature "twists"; instead, he uses the whole affair as a delivery device, a vehicle, if you will, for his dialogue. The underdeveloped denizens of this simplistic landscape make it easy for Mametspeak to take center stage.
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Don't remember much about this one.
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The film never had any tension, it missed something and the dialogue didn't help.
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Σπουδαιος David Mamet
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In Heist, Mamet isn’t nearly as interested in showing us characters whose actions and suspicions are as intelligent as to put together a back-up plan; here, he’s showing the actual back-up plans in motion, some of which are necessary – and some of which are not, occasionally dipping into the back-up plan of a back-up plan (and so forth). The delight here, as I missed the first time around, is the purity of the thing. Taking a note from the critical notices praising his machismo scheming and elaborate red herring filled confidence games over the years, Mamet seems to have put together a film that contains little else but a robbery, another robbery and a twisty who’s-fucking-who scheme which streams…
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This is Mamet unchained! There are a handful of writers working today that have such a distinct voice and style that you can tell who wrote the screenplay after only a couple of lines. Tarantino, Sorkin, and Mamet all come to mind. All also write mostly masculine, cut throat dialogue. Well I got news for you. Mamet script would make any of those other scripts its bitch. Mamet is as hardcore as it comes and he lets it all hang out in this film.
Heist is, believe it or not, a heist film. It is also, wait for it, a heist film that cons the viewer. Of course you know this going into a post modern heist film, so you…