Word: heist
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...comeuppance; and a climax where three crucial events are occurring with implausible simultaneity. In HSM it's a basketball game, a scholarly competition and the final auditions for the show; in Take the Lead a dance contest, a deb ball and the main boy's participation in a heist. (You don't see these movies for the plots...
...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...