There's really nothing new about Heist, and the plot seems typical of the whole crime-action genre: there's the good criminal, the Boss, explosions and greed. But this is a David Mamet movie, so the violence is an accessory to the plot, not the essence of it. It's the exchange of dialogue, not of bullets, that keeps Heist fast-paced and fun to watch.
Mamet criminals are more verbose than typical Hollywood criminals. In Heist, Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) is probably one of the few bank robbers who would be so philosophical as to comment that "Love makes the world go around. Love of gold." This language, rather than making him seem less true-to-life, only makes him more intriguing. His lifestyle seems to be going well until he gets caught on a security tape during a bank robbery. Now he's "burned"--done with--and plans to go south on his sailboat.
Danny DeVito re-teams with Hackman (they were in Get Shorty together), playing Bergman, the boss who forces Moore to take one last big job. Standing barely five feet tall, DeVito manages to be quite cutthroat and, at times, intimidating. The "big job"--replete with explosives, fake identities, burning rubber and ticking clocks--involves stealing Swiss gold right out of an airliner on the runway.
Mamet makes his characters' motives ambiguous. Are they working as a team for this heist or are they working for themselves? It's hard to tell, especially with Moore's young wife (Rebecca Pidgeon), who may or may not be betraying her husband. Just how wily is she? "She could talk her way out of a sunburn," Moore brags. Moore seems to trust her. But we can't decide who she's really working for--her husband or Bergman's nephew (Sam Rockwell). Pidgeon is so subtle that she keeps us unsure as to whether she is being clever or manipulative. Also, Hackman never reveals too much in Moore's character, keeping us wondering what he has planned and what he hasn't.
In Heist, this ambiguity draws us into the movie. We ask the same questions the characters are asking themselves, and we are surprised when they are.
But perhaps Mamet's greatest trick is using clever plot twists and sharp dialogue to make a gold-loving, murderous criminal someone to root for.
