Heist

Having taken a few surprising diversions with his most recent pictures, the movie business romantic comedy State and Maine and his straight staging of Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (which, incidentally, is well worth seeking out, if only for yet another terrific but overlooked Jeremy Northam performance), writer-director David Mamet is back on more predictable territory.

Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) is a professional thief whose crew (Delroy Lindo, Ricky Jay and, playing Moore's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon) is coerced into the proverbial One Last Job by fence Bergman (a superbly unctuous Danny DeVito), who insists Joe involve his strutting lieutenant (Sam Rockwell) in the proceedings. Rockwell's presence complicates both Hackman's plans to cut Bergman loose and his relationship with Pidgeon to whom the younger man takes a shine. So the scene is set for the familiar litany of Mametesque twists, turns and grittily funny macho dialogue.

If that sounds dismissive, it is not intended to be so. No-one does this sort of thing better than Mamet and here he is helped by, perhaps for the first time as a director, a truly top-notch cast. Hackman gets better and better, all bonhomie one moment, violent stillness the next. The surprise is Pidgeon, whose prior casting in Mamet's pictures might uncharitably be accounted for by her being Mrs. Mamet. Here she is a revelation, her usual prissyness discarded in favour of a simmering, controlled sexuality. The dialogue is truly vintage Mamet, and includes such bon mots as: "Everyone wants money. That's why it's called money."

The problem is that as a film director, Mamet isn't really up to much. There isn't one of his pictures that is not at least watchable, and with his first, House of Games, he raised the bar higher than he has been able to reach subsequently. The trouble is that although his subject matter has become more diverse and ambitious, his visual sense remains pedestrian. The dockside shoot-out at the end of Heist is a case in point. Instead of racking up the tension, it looks for all the world like the short-lived crime spoof TV show Police Squad, all hunched figures behind cardboard boxes and leather bomber-jacketed heavies falling into the water. Mamet is now clearly a middling Hollywood player and is able to do pretty much as he pleases within certain budgetary constraints. But the truth is Heist would have been better served by a director respectful enough of the screenplay and good with actors, but with a more flamboyant style. Maybe someone should put Mamet and Steven Soderbergh together in a room and see what they can come up with.

Reviewed by John Atkinson