If you like:
James Caan style of acting, if you like heist movies and simple down-to-earth kind of drab environments. Than this is a great movie for you.
If you're more into Fantastical Heist films with overly exaggerated machinery and Technologies* being used with ridiculous over-the-top characters and extreme camera techniques and music than maybe you want to stick with something like Ocean's Eleven or possibly those Mission Impossible movies. (I'm not 100% on those I've never actually watched them.)
A slow-burn dramatic Heist movie. Kind of.
The heist is in the film and I think the filmmakers want you to believe that it's the point of the movie.
Most of the film is just James Caan doing stuff. Some of which is in relation to the heist. Like acquiring certain bits of technology or finding out what the safe is made of, so he can drill into it properly. The real meat of the movie is just James Caan talking with this girl that he's interested in. A woman who seems to have nowhere in life to go and yet lives semi decently.
Or interacting with this mobster guy who tries everything in his power to get James interested in his heist in the first place.
I've seen a bunch of reviews that tried to describe the film as a lost thief who wishes to live a normal life. And I kind of believe that.
We are told and shown that James Caan wants to get into a relationship and maybe have a kid. But it doesn't seem like a goal for him so much as a project or even just a hobby. In fact everything in his life seems to be a hobby. From stealing things to finding relationships to even trying to sell crappy cars in his cover up job.
His entire life is shown on this one picture that he carries around. Which is a superimposed image of other images that have all been stuck together to try and represent some sort of overall existence for James Caan.
He's a convict has been in prison for 10 years and it's only been out for a few afterwards. He's in his mid-30s he has little to no legitimate training in Practical work and he can't even get most basic jobs because of his criminal background.
combines that with his indifference worldview that he adopted while in prison and you have a man with very high technical skill only specialised into one field that can't be utilised in any legitimate business. Thus the perfect professional criminal. With absolutely no Hang-Ups, no regrets and no worries.
the only reason anything ends up failing in the end is because he acquired bad work from an incredibly corrupt man after letting his guard down because of his attempts at Living a normal life. He wanted a wife, he wanted a kid, he wanted a house. And he gets all these things with the help of some Criminal Who sets them up to do one of the biggest scorers in history. Of course the guys are real scumbag and cheats him out of his money afterwards. Then threatens to kill him and possibly his wife and child if he doesn't comply.
so James Caan being the purest definition of an independent entrepreneur takes his wife and child gets the most far away from him as humanly possible with absolutely no strings attached and then goes on to kill the very man who employed him in the first place.
What I love most about this movie is the Simplicity and down-to-earth feel of it all. Modern action movies would have everything drawn over the top. The Heist would be big and bombastic. It would be full of problems and issues that would be scheming and betrayal, snitches and an even bigger score. It would be linked with highly corrupted businessman and possibly politicians and the whole thing would be given this nasty image to it so that when we saw them getting robbed we felt good about it.
James Caan would be a more nobleman, somebody who deserves that score who has a checkered past. His wife and child would ultimately be in danger but never would see any real harm.
But we don't get any of that here, we never find out who's running the building. We don't know anything personal about practically anybody. There's no great skiing behind anything, there's no hiccups in the heist. Everything works out fairly well. And you're still fascinated to watch because you want to see how a group of simple safe crackers are going to open up one of the most sophisticated safes of the age. And watching the gradual build-up as they tackle it was very simple yet sophisticated tactics.
Personally what I enjoy about this movie so much is its mix of simple but effective action mixed in with long diatribes of character motivation. You'll get a couple minutes of loud angry men beating the crap out of each other and in an police interrogation room and then you'll get 20 to 30 minutes of two people sitting in a coffee Diner just talking about their life.
* I'm talking more over the talk technology. EMP bombs, laser-guided tripwire's, camera hacking surveillance technology. If it sounds like it belongs in a James Bond movie or one of the more ridiculous Splinter Cell games then it's probably advanced. Although the movie Thief does have some Advanced Hardware.
There's this kind of super drill they make for their main hist which is able to melt even the most intense of metals. That thing's over-the-top and ridiculous. But as technology goes it's all fairly simple. The most advanced thing they own is a (kind of) galvanometer and they only use that so you can tell the amount of current going through a wire, to see if it's for a phone or possibly a radio transmitter. Otherwise it's all pretty basic affair.
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