BEFORE: I'm deep into heist films now, so I might as well stick with it. I think I recorded this one thinking it was about art theft, maybe to go with "The Thomas Crown Affair", then I didn't end up watching it. So I'll bat some clean-up now.
THE PLOT: A woman is released from prison, an expert bank robber who wants to settle down and go straight, but her parole officer and her former employer try to get her to pull one more heist.
AFTER: This film has a lot in common with last night's film - but it was made first, so maybe I should go easy on it. After all, a lot of elements are fairly common to Hollywood's imagining of what bank robberies are like - we've got the retired safecracker who's trying to go straight, but gets convinced to pull off JUST one more job, the contemptible crime-boss who finances the operation, the assembling of the special team, drilling into the vault from the chicken restaurant or bakery next door, etc. etc.
The twist here is that the expert bank robber is a woman, newly released from six years in prison, and determined to go straight. But she can't get a decent job with a criminal record, and everyone from her parole officer to her new boyfriend (also a thief) is pushing her to go back to work for the boss who led her last bank job - the one that put her in prison. Though she refuses at first, her son is kidnapped to make her comply.
So there are plenty of questionable morals among all of the characters - so how do we, the audience, decide who to root for? Thinking that certain characters should prevail just because they're coerced to commit a crime seems a little arbitrary - are they slightly less evil than the people holding the guns? Should we just root for the main characters, or the beautiful people, because it's more convenient? It all seems kind of murky to me. I know who the filmmakers WANT me to root for, but you have to believe that two wrongs make a right in order to do that...
Of course, the WHY of the heist is easy to figure out - everyone's either motivated by the money, or by the concept of saving a family member held hostage. But it's the HOW that makes a heist film interesting - and there are a few interesting tricks here, like intentionally setting off the bank's security system to condition the police to think they're responding to false alarms. But just as often, this crack team seems to just be able to invent the exact doohickey needed to do a particular thingy - because there couldn't possibly be bank vault technology that's ahead of the thieves skills...
Starring Kim Basinger (last seen in "My Stepmother Is an Alien"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "Deja Vu"), and Terence Stamp (last seen in "Get Smart")
RATING: 4 out of 10 moneybags
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