"Heist"

David Mamet sucks all the joy out of a venerable genre in his latest staccato, cliché-ridden crime story.

By Charles Taylor

Nov. 14, 2001 | "Heist" opens with the Warner Bros. logo in black-and-white, accompanied by the studio's theme music familiar from the gangster films and muckraking melodramas that characterized Warners in the '30s and '40s. "Heist," though, was written and directed by David Mamet, which means it's taken much more seriously than any genre movie would be, although it doesn't have any of the crude energy or spark or pacing of good genre filmmaking.

"Heist" is Mamet's latest game of guess-who's-screwing-who? And at this point who still cares? Gene Hackman plays a professional thief who's "burnt" -- his picture is picked up by a video surveillance camera during a jewelry store robbery. He decides it's time to retire, but the sleazy furrier (Danny DeVito, in a role that he's outgrown) who financed the job refuses to give him his cut of the proceeds unless Hackman and his crew pull off a robbery that he's set up. Having no money to run with, Hackman agrees and assembles his crew (Delroy Lindo, Ricky Jay and the inscrutable Rebecca Pidgeon). He's also forced to take on one of DeVito's men (Sam Rockwell, who wears the same mustache he had in "Galaxy Quest," a thing that looks as if he soaks it overnight in sardine oil). What ensues is the usual Mamet shell game of double crosses and scams and betrayals.

Is it too much to ask of a movie that details the exploits of professional thieves and con men to have some verve or style or sense of humor? The pleasure of watching (or reading) a story about thieves is to settle for a few hours into the mind-set of the fleecers, to fantasize about what it would be like if you could just take what you wanted instead of having to work for a living. That's the joy of the comic crime novels of Ross Thomas, Joe Gores and Donald E. Westlake. Even in a picture like "Heist," which is clearly intended as a diversion, an exercise in craft, Mamet is one of the least playful writer-directors around. It doesn't take long to see that "Heist" is going to proceed by his usual m.o. We're stuck in a series of drab, crummy rooms watching the actors (mostly men) grumble and bitch in Mamet's trademark clipped, profane, back-and-forth dialogue.

For all the surface grit of Mamet-speak it's actually very stylized, owing more to Harold Pinter's pause-fests than to the hard-boiled style it appears to emulate. Much hard-boiled writing is actually quite effusive (and even sentimental). It revels in its own low view of the world. For all the impromptu rages Mamet's dialogue provides actors, his approach is to suck everything dry, to reduce everyone to their basest motives but remove their pleasure in their own duplicity. The crooks here don't want to work for a living, but their planning and wiles seem as joyless as any grind of a job. Mamet clearly doesn't intend "Heist" to be one of his worm's-eye views of the human condition, as "American Buffalo" and "Glengarry Glen Ross" were. But I think the key to his being taken so seriously lies precisely in the fact that he brings what's essentially a genre movie the same po-faced glumness. Audiences or critics who would feel as if they were slumming were they to go to a genre movie or pick up a crime novel can go to "Heist" and feel there's something serious and worthy going on.

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