“Ocean’s Twelve” (2004)
Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” is an elegant, entertaining piece of work, one of the few remakes that tops the original. But it’s sequel, 2004’s “Ocean’s Twelve,” is the film buff’s pick of the trilogy: a looser heist flick that’s pure pleasure from start to finish. Indebted to films of the European New Wave, it’s one of Soderbergh’s most formally experimental pictures, and watching him get away with it in a studio tentpole is all the more thrilling. Yes, the Julia-Roberts-plays-a-character-who-plays-Julia-Roberts scene at the end is a little smug, but for the most part, it’s an ingenious, enjoyable picture, and one that doesn’t deserve the critical evisceration it received on its release: indeed, it’s become something of a Playlist favorite as the years have passed. And as a heist movie, it’s unmatched in the last decade, with a number of set pieces (most notably the Vincent Cassel capoeira sequence, introduced at the suggestion of the actor), which beats anything in the likes of “Takers.”
“Inside Man” (2006)
Until he bottled it with “Miracle At St. Anna” (although even that film has its defenders here), Spike Lee was on quite a run in the middle of the aughts. “The 25th Hour” was one of the best films of the decade, and “When The Levees Broke” was one of the better documentaries. In between those two, he delivered easily his most mainstream film to date, the heist picture “Inside Man.” While it initially looked rather generic, it proved to not only be an effortlessly entertaining film for grown-ups but also proved to be a Spike Lee Joint through and through. While the plotting was admittedly far-fetched, the central heist conceit was suspenseful and unpredictable, and the cast were uniformly terrific, clearly having the time of their lives: Denzel Washington sleazy, loose and likable, Clive Owen steely, wry and mercenary, and Jodie Foster giving perhaps the best performance we’ve seen from her in a decade, in the kind of role she rarely takes these days. And that’s without mentioning Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer, or the typically vibrant New York ensemble Lee collected. It’s also unexpectedly and consistently hilarious, shot with a 70s-inflected, Lumet-esque flair and style and an NYC picture through and through.
“Blue Collar” (1978)
Gripping, quietly intense and tragic (this writer was totally depressed after watching it), Paul Schrader’s 1978 directorial debut (just two years after he penned “Taxi Driver”) is an incredibly underrated and underseen effort in the spotty filmmaker’s body of work (we’ll qualify that momentarily). Whether written or directed (or in this case both), Schrader’s 1970s work (“Rolling Thunder,” “Obsession,” “Hardcore”), was almost always preoccupied with the post-Vietnam/post-Nixon American decay and this preoccupation was perhaps never better exemplified than in “Blue Collar.” Starring Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Koto and, in a rare dramatic turn, Richard Pryor, the film centers on three disaffected Detroit auto workers who, fed up with their low wages and maltreatment from their ineffectual union and bosses, hatch a plan to rob their union’s safe. A botched effort from the get-go, the plan begins to quickly unravel when the trio uncover the labor organization’s illegal loan-lending operation and the anxiety builds from the mounting criminal investigation. Schrader’s early films were all seething with almost uncontrollable outrage and fury, that likely had something to do with his repressed Calvinist upbringing, but never has a heist picture felt so vitriolic in its inception and then heartbreaking in its demise. The film also stars Ed Begley Jr. and boasts a score by the venerable Jack Nitzsche.
“The Getaway” (1972)
Based on a novel by the poet laureate of hard pulp Jim Thompson, directed by feminist favorite Sam Peckinpah, and starring a Steve McQueen firmly in the midst of a cocaine-soaked marriage breakdown, “The Getaway” rises out of a dense fog of testosterone: it doesn’t get any more boys-night-in than that. Ali McGraw (somewhat miscast, to occasionally charming effect) uses her wiles to free husband “Doc” McCoy (McQueen) from prison. After a botched bank robbery, the bickering pair go on the run with the loot, pursued by cannon-fodder cops and a variety of goons, led by the astonishingly repellent and malevolent Rudy (Al Letteria). Perhaps inevitably, it all culminates in a bloodbath in El Paso, and a tender reconciliation for the then real-life lovers. This is by no means top-tier Peckinpah; both he and McQueen were desperate for a no-nonsense hit after the commercial failure of “Junior Bonner” (1972). Nevertheless, all the staples are there — stunningly edited montages, patented slo-mo bullet ballet — and “The Getaway” is a solid, straight-ahead action flick that’s always fun to wander into the middle of on late night T.V. Possibly not Robert Evans’ favorite film though…
“Bob Le Flambeur” (1956)
The significance of “Bob Le Flambeur” cannot be overstated. Alongside “Rififi“, it represented the birth of a new school — a sensibility that was equally American and French, and managed the rare feat of being both shamelessly derivative and palpably new. Shot on a shoestring around the streets of Paris, often utilizing natural light and DIY hand-held techniques, Bob is also the clear precursor to “A bout de souffle” and the whole ethos of the New Wave. It could easily have been just another riff on Huston’s heist movie bible “The Asphalt Jungle,” but instead Melville utilizes the basic ‘Jungle’ structure to develop a wry, comedic study of a character and his milieu. As such, Roger Duchesne‘s titular anti-hero is one of the screen’s earliest and best explorations of the compulsive gambler, for whom risk is a way of life, an existential vocation. For this reason, Melville’s film is better understood as undermining its genre expectations, as an antiheist movie in some regards. But it goes beyond genre to become many things – a poetic hymn to Paris and the lives of its marginal, nocturnal denizens, a classical elegy of bygone chivalry and honor in a twilight world, and a wry exploration of the inexplicable operations of chance, as seen through the eyes of a soulful gambler. A key formative work from one of the crucial architects of the heist picture.