Few narrative jumping-off points are as frequently recycled for the heist movie as the “one last job” trope. David Mamet’s Heist (2001) marks another repurposing, though it’s so agilely plotted and scripted that we don’t often think about how we’ve in many ways already seen this movie. In Heist, the “one last job” in question is assigned just after the bungling of the tricky jewelry-store break-in that opens the film. Everything goes swimmingly for the team, led by veteran Joe Moore (Gene Hackman), maneuvering through it up until Joe takes his first few steps into the shop. He’s forgotten to put on his rubber mask and doesn’t register his mistake until the surveillance camera perched in the corner of the lobby has captured his mug. Goods are still collected, the police narrowly skirted. But now Joe can be easily identified by both the footage and the witness he was caught incapacitating on camera. The mishap persuades him to leave professional thievery, something from which he’s long been worn out anyway, behind for good; he has designs to retire onto a houseboat with his young wife, Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon).
But the blunder sits so badly with Joe and co.’s fence, Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito), that the latter decides to withhold payment for the successful-but-dinged-up jewelry-store job until this otherwise dependable crew completes an ever-more-convoluted gig. It involves, to keep it simple, emptying a plane transporting gold of said gold. Collaborative unity would obviously make the complex mission doable, if still a pain. But loyalty is vulnerable right now. With an exception in long-time right-hand man Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo), with whom communicating is so second-nature for Joe that almost nothing needs to be said to get a point across, there’s no telling whether Mickey or veteran member Pinky (Ricky Jay) or Fran won’t try anything cunningly self-serving that puts everything in jeopardy. There’s also a complicating factor in Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell), Mickey’s cocksure young nephew who’s begrudgingly added as a team member. His front of undermined-by-inexperience certainty in himself may actually be a ruse; it doesn’t help that he has his eyes for Fran, who is eventually making eyes back.
Double-crossings soon run rampant. Like Mamet’s earlier House of Games (1987), many viewers will enjoy all the second-guessing, and wondering whether something tricky going on is in fact organic — something everyone in a room is really worried about — or if it has been precisely engineered by one poker-faced player in particular, secretly smiling about how things are going as they’d hoped. But in House of Games there was a slinkiness, a breeziness — youthful excitement about deceit. Heist, however, is mostly populated by people who don’t really want to do this anymore. Their deceptions don’t thrill them much these days because the deceptions are more about survival, tools to leave behind a world of crime on top rather than all used up with nothing to show for it.
The performances are universally good. Everyone has a tight handle on so-called “Mamet speak”; no one ever comes across merely as a device for the wicked games to continue. Hackman, though, has a particular edge that you remember: he’s exhausted from a lifetime of this, with barely enough energy left over to try to stay a step ahead of people who might be on his side or maybe not after all. In Heist, it’s tiring to be clever, though it isn’t without its rewards.
Peterson Reviews 