Word: heist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...smart and entertaining: 16 Blocks, also starring Willis, as an alcoholic cop trying to get a witness to safety; Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty, in which Vin Diesel's mobster acts as his own defense lawyer; and Spike Lee's skillfully orchestrated story of a bank heist, Inside Man. None of them require the audience to embrace heavy-duty fantasy or comic-romantic fatuity. They have grit, wit and style, plus a semblance of reality--things popular American movies regularly used to have. Is this a trend? One might hope...
There are also different kinds of criminals, not all of them in Tony's league--feloniously or dramatically. The high-class burglars in NBC's Heist (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), planning to take down a Beverly Hills jewelry store, fall into the Ocean's Eleven school of fast-talking, ice-cool swells. (Hustle, a British import nearing the end of its season on AMC, takes a similar tack with a band of con artists.) The robbers (led by Dougray Scott and The Practice's Steve Harris) gab about strippers and Mother Teresa while on a job; the cops who chase...
...dramatists, you make a pact with your audience that you don't cross certain lines, and we don't," says Mark Cullen. Heist's crooks don't kill--in the pilot, they foil a murder--and they take, Robin Hood-- like, only from the rich. (So they skip the give-to-the-poor bit. Nobody's perfect!) In fact, Heist's greatest crime is robbing innocent movies of their clichés: the Tarantino-gone-PG banter, the whooshing camera shots, the generic peppy jazz that sounds as if it were lifted from a Putumayo Presents Lighthearted Caper Music...
...first few minutes, FX's Thief (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) seems to be in the same jaunty, crime's-a-spree mold. As in Heist, we begin with a wisecracking crew getting ready to take down a cache of jewels--"Just say no to blow, kids," quips ringleader Nick (Andre Braugher) as he blasts open a vault. But the game quickly gets heavy, and the story more gripping: along the way, Nick's crew finds and steals a pile of cash that turns out to belong to the Chinese Mafia. Revenge is sought, friends turn on each other, and people...
...does so with a deft, fun touch that makes it feel fresher than the average cops-and-robbers soirée. Perhaps its trickiest feat is balancing two distinct storylines: a cop movie (the police are the good guys and the drama is behind the barricades) and a heist movie (the robbers are the good guys and the fun is in seeing them pull off their convoluted plot). It is hard to cheer for both sides at once, but the movie makes it possible (no telling who wins in the end, though) by directing all our antipathy towards another, separate...