With The Bank Job due in theaters on Friday, Terrence Rafferty takes a look back at the long film history of "small groups of very intense people stealing stuff from banks, art museums, racetracks, casinos, high-end jewelers, armored cars and railroad trains." His piece in the New York Times dissects the heist movie and its enduring popularity.
There are two words that appear in the plot descriptions of most successful heist pictures: "gone awry." As Rafferty explains, that's a big part of the fun. "Although the planning of the crime — the recruiting of the team, the diagrams of security systems, the blueprints, the maps of getaway routes — usually takes up a fair amount of screen time and is often terrifically entertaining, nobody in the audience really wants to see the job go exactly as the thieves have doped it out. That would be kind of redundant, and worse, it would feel uncomfortably impersonal. Heist pictures are all about process, technique, mechanics; the blind accidents are what keep them human."
The complexity of the plan is a huge part of the appeal as well, particularly if it is depicted in a visually arresting manner. "Film is extremely good both at laying out the details of complicated processes and at capturing, on the fly, moments of spontaneity; the balance between them is never more evident than it is in a first-rate heist picture, because elaborate crimes are among the few human activities that movies dare to show us the step-by-step process of. Writing a perfect sonnet is at least as difficult as knocking over a bank — and as susceptible to the mysterious operations of chance — but who wants to watch Yeats stare out the window and scratch his head for 90 minutes, even if, in the end, he pulls off ‘Leda and the Swan'? All in all we'd rather look at guys digging tunnels and emptying safe-deposit boxes."
Rafferty finds most of the recent entries in the genre more comic than tense; there's not much nail-biting in the Ocean's pictures or the remake of The Italian Job. He also can't help but notice that the criminals are getting away with the loot more often than they did in the past. In these respects, The Bank Job "is something of a novelty these days, a throwback to the good old days of the heist movie, when the purloining of large quantities of money and/or valuables from heavily guarded institutions seemed at least a little, I don't know, dangerous."