Heist

2001 Drama

Esteemed writer/director David Mamet fashioned this homage to the elegant, character-driven "tough guy" genre pictures of Warner Bros. in the 1930s and '40s, even using vintage scores in the soundtrack. Gene Hackman stars as Joe Moore, an accomplished thief whose career is jeopardized after he's caught on security cameras during a job. Broke, Joe and his associates Bobby (Delroy Lindo) and Pinky (Ricky Jay) are blackmailed by their longtime fence Bergman (Danny DeVito) into jacking Swiss gold bars from an airplane. As they plot the complicated score, Joe and his crew become suspicious of the relationship between Joe's young wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon) and Bergman's nephew Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell), who has been planted on the crew to keep an eye on them for his uncle. Betrayals and backstabbings are the order of the day as Joe gets closer to the payday of a lifetime. In an effort to reinforce the solid storytelling of classic crime dramas, Mamet eschewed the use of computers or high-tech gadgetry in the complicated plot. Heist (2001) co-stars Patti LuPone. more..

Director: David Mamet

Starring: Gene Hackman,Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgeon

 30 Reviews

Reviews

  • Mamet -- crafts tangy, well-seasoned dialogue that a good cast can feast on. And this cast is prime.

    Peter Travers - Rolling Stone

    26 April 2013

  • The kind of caper movie that was made before special effects replaced wit, construction and intelligence. This movie is made out of fresh ingredients, not cake mix. Despite the twists of its plot, it is about its characters.

    Roger Ebert - The Chicago Sun-Times

    26 April 2013

  • Mamet takes exactly those qualities that we most prize in genre movies -- characters, cleverness and high style -- and refines them to a high shine.

    Michael Wilmington - The Chicago Tribune

    26 April 2013

  • An exciting caper, though sometimes a trying one, with great dollops of self-parodying dialogue that will test your loyalty to Mr. Mamet's way with words.

    Joe Morgenstern - The Wall Street Journal

    26 April 2013

  • If it's not up to the cups-and-balls elegance of previous Mamet movies like ''The Spanish Prisoner'' and ''House of Games,'' if it piles on more psychological fake-outs than is safe in a setup this size -- well, at least it's got that talk, that language, that thing Mamet does that is at this point as identifiable as the cadences of the Bard.

    Lisa Schwarzbaum - Entertainment Weekly

    26 April 2013

Awards

No awards

Lists

No lists

©2013 Movie Monitor