Heist
Director: David Mamet
Year Released: 2001
Rating: 1.5
Mamet may be leaning towards self-parody here: his usually crisp verbal zingers have become limp, hokey and stupid, and no one makes them sound any more convincing. I don't know if he's slipping as much as his making too many movies in a row: in 2000 he had State & Main and before that The Winslow Boy and The Spanish Prisoner (which I liked a lot). I can certainly understand not wanting to go back to the stage - where's the money in that? - but there are a lot of other bad 'heist' movies out there: do we need another? There are so many u-turns and "surprise" moments (Gene Hackman's character has to be the most ingenious man in the world and capable of ESP) that any sense of 'reality' is shot to hell; the ending is just plain dumb.
