Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

Three Films Make A Post: The heist begins at 40,000 ft.

Lift (2024): This Netflix production as directed by F. Gary Gray is rather astonishing. Astonishing in how forgettable it is. If I hadn’t made a couple of notes while watching it, I’d remember not a thing about it a week after having seen it. Going by these notes, this is a heist movie neither charming enough to be light fun, nor serious enough to ever build up any stakes one might care about.

It also contains a terribly written romance between Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a somewhat inexplicable performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is certainly doing something that may or may not have anything to do with an attempt at being Udo Kier.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to even waste another sentence on.

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023): Screenwriter Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut is a very frustrating movie. In its beginning stages, it makes interesting and creepy use of the urban myth of the mass disappearances in US National Parks, with quite a few shots of mildly disturbing background happenings our protagonist doesn’t notice. In these early stages the film builds a wonderful mood of the weird and the outré.

Alas, its back half consists of what amounts to an endless dream sequence in which said protagonist – Georgina Campbell, wasted –works through emotional issues through the most hackneyed and obvious symbolism possible at tedious length, until the film finally ends. The Weird turns into the boringly prosaic.

Life of Belle (2024): I had heard rather nice buzz about Shawn Robinson’s POV horror (in the Paranormal Activity vein) piece. I can’t say the film does very much for me at all. While its approach to a child filming random childish crap while the borders of her world slowly break down in the background is certainly interesting, it’s also a bit tedious. That the film goes quite as heavy on the “mentally ill equals evil” part of the horror equation because it tries to be too subtle about its supernatural bits doesn’t exactly make it more likeable. Though I do have to give it props for not being afraid of eventually leading its audience into tasteful but disturbing scenes of child abuse.

Like with Lovely, Dark and Deep, there is a clear influence of creepypasta on display; like that movie, and a lot of creepypasta itself, Life of Belle has trouble getting beyond showing a handful of creepy images and calling that a movie.

Rififi (1955)

Original title: Du rififi chez les hommes

Tony (Jean Servais) has just gotten out of prison. He is now a bitter and at least half broken man, at least in part because his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) left him while he was inside and absconded with the loot of the heist he was in for to boot. After abusing Mado – who now has a new horrible boyfriend in form of gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici) – with a belt, Tony decides he’s going to go down in a blaze of glory. So he accepts the invitation of a buddy of his own young friend Jo (Carl Möhner), an Italian named – in a fit of deep originality – Mario (Robert Manuel), to help the younger men with a heist on a jewellery store. Instead of the smash and grab they had initially planned, though, Tony suggests they do something much bigger. Adding Italian safecracker Cesare (director Jules Dassin himself) to the team, they come up with a plan to get into the store’s rather impressive vault.

Thanks to excellent preparation and some cool professionalism during the job (imagine the opposite of Money Heist), the heist goes off without a hitch. The problems start afterwards, when Cesare, an inveterate champion of buying women who are otherwise out of his league, uses a piece of jewellery from the heist for his unhealthy hobby. Soon Grutter and his junkie brother Remi (Robert Hossein) are on our crew’s trail, and these men do not follow the handful of rules of criminal conduct even an abusive prick like Tony believes in.

There’s a reason why Jules Dassin’s Rififi is typically listed among the greatest and most influential heist movies – it’s pretty much a perfect example of the form, made by a filmmaker whose style to my eyes prefigures the hyper-realism of Scorsese and the detail-obsession of somebody like Michael Mann.

Quite a bit of the film takes place on actual grimy Parisian streets, but instead of mere documentary realism, Dassin’s eye for the often artfully artless looking shot, followed by the not at all artless looking next and often very dynamic (by mid 50s standards, not Michael Bay, obviously and fortunately) editing, turn these into an ideal of Grimy Parisian Streets that expresses the idea of the term just as much – one might suggest even better – than their actual reality.

Dassin’s ability to focus on the right details comes to the fore in the legendary, long, wordless heist sequence that produces great tension out of watching men at their (illegal) precision work. There’s a painstaking focus on detail in this sequence, as well as total trust in the audience’s ability to understand what’s going in it based on what it has seen in the preparation stages of the heist; both come together to create twenty minutes of incredible tension.

But even after that, Rififi isn’t through. At this point, you can expect a degree of slackening of tension in most heist movies – on the plot or the visual level – but this is not a film willing to stop and breathe for a moment. Dassin starts building tension again at once, this time, using quite a bit of the character building he has done in the first act to create the sling that’s going to throttle the characters, and goes through a series of suspenseful sequences that are just as tightly focussed and brilliantly conceived as the heist. This being a French movie, the characters’ doom does not feel like a moral judgement on them (in fact, modern sensibilities could argue that Tony’s abusive relationship with Mado could use a bit more of a moral judgement from the film), but as a result of the way the world works for any of us.

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

Three Films Make A Post: LONDON IS ABOUT TO GET A TASTE OF TEXAS

Gate aka 게이트 (2017): Shin Jai-ho’s comedic heist movie suffers from the general lowbrow-ness of its humour, a certain tackiness in the presentation of its melodramatic moments, and never gets to the point you find in so many South Korean genre movies when they just straight out break iron-clad genre rules to go and do their own thing.

It’s still watchable enough: Shin certainly is a slick director, and the cast do their best to fill out their thin characters enough to at least make them halfway fun to watch.

Freeze (2022): Clearly, Charlie Steeds never stops making movies for a second. This time around Steeds and his usual ensemble go for a tale of Arctic horror with clear traditional Lovecraftian signifiers like murderous, weird fish people, and books that should not be read. Between the wonderful hand-made gore, this one puts particular emphasis on Steeds’s brand of home-made surrealism, turning parts of the proceedings so dream-like, the film’s weaknesses – some of the sets really only suggest what they are supposed to be instead of portraying it, and the acting is often decidedly un-naturalistic – only emphasize the peculiar mood of the whole affair. Half gory low budget fish people action and half surrealistic cheap nightmare is a pretty irresistible combination, if you ask me.

One Ranger (2023): Jesse V. Johnson is certainly one of the better directors working in low budget action today, so there’s always at the very least a solid standard to the basic filmmaking in his movies, as well as action sequences that tend to look much costlier than they are.

This time around, Johnson seems to have been able to work on a slightly better budget than usual, but the resulting film isn’t one of his best. I appreciate the film’s peculiar sense of humour, its attempts at giving its villain an actual character arc, and I’m certainly happy to see a “The Expanse” reunion with Thomas Jane (pretending very hard to be Texan) and Dominique Tipper in the leads, as well as short appearances by John Malkovich and Patrick Bergin.

However, the structure of the film as a whole just seems off, rather as if this wasn’t shot following a proper script but a first draft of one – and while people who have no clue will tell you action movie scripts only need action scenes, flow is incredibly important for the genre. And flow is what One Ranger lacks.

Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.

Sneakers (1992)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Bishop (Robert Redford), a computer and security expert still nominally on the run from the government for non-sins committed in the 60s, leads a group of freelance weirdos doing the early 90s offline – and a little online – white hat hacking, with a clear Robin Hood streak. The rest of the team are former CIA man Crease (Sidney Poitier), the grown-up of the gang, blind man with excellent ears Whistler (David Strathairn), Forteana and conspiracy nut Mother (Dan Aykroyd, really going out of his comfort zone there), and young guy Carl (River Phoenix). When she and Bishop were still an item, ultra-straight Liz (Mary McDonnell) was also part of the group, but she’s still on good enough terms to help out when asked nicely.

Asking nicely isn’t the strength of the NSA, apparently. Instead, the agency is pressing our heroes into their service to steal a mysterious black box via the magic of not so veiled threats and money. At least our protagonists do have a challenging, and therefore interesting, job in acquiring it.

Unfortunately, once the heist is over, things get dangerous: the box itself is capable of cracking any kind of code and encryption used in the US; worse still, the NSA people aren’t actually working for the NSA but are private service bad guys in the service of one Cosmo (Ben Kingsley). And Cosmo just happens to be part of Bishop’s major past trauma. In any case, an object like the magical box belongs neither in his hand nor in that of the government, so a second heist will have to occur.

And make no mistake, Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers is, its outer appearance made out of badly understood and dramatized 90s hi-tech notwithstanding, in many regards a very traditional heist movie, belonging right next to films about sympathetic con-men sticking it to the Man in various forms in the less greed-minded side-arm of the genre.

As is typical, and perfectly fine, for the genre, Sneakers mostly throws plausibility out of the window for its version of the Rule of Cool, safe in the assumption an audience will let implausibilities slide in this context, if you just present them with enough charm. It’s absolutely the right choice, too, and if one hasn’t taken one’s monthly dose of ridiculous but fun plans nearly thwarted by silly problems, and perhaps hasn’t re-watched this in quite some time, Sneakers is a fine way to get one’s hit of these specific genre tropes.

Particularly because its cast is quite as fine as it is, with Redford, Poitier, Strathairn and the rest all providing some great middle-aged star power with performances that not just manage to create perfectly likeable two-note characters but also do the heavy work when it comes to balance the film’s considerable number of – often genuinely funny – jokes, quips and mildly silly situations with the more serious elements of the plot. It does help that most of these guys and the lady are all well versed in the serious as well as the funny stuff, and can shift from one acting stance to the other at a moment’s notice while keeping their characters whole. Well, I’m not terribly happy with Kingsley’s performance, I have to admit, because he falls into his rather typical trap of being all tics, bad accent and far-fetched body language when everyone around him is relaxed and giving the impression of the naturalistic even when portraying an implausible character type. One cannot blame the man for not putting any effort in, though.

On the direction side, things are a bit conservative, certainly never flashy and not exactly inspired. Which seems rather typical of a director whose handful of other films also never suggest much of a directorial personality beyond the ability to hold things together professionally and trust in his actors. While that’s not an approach to direction that’ll ever win many deserved prizes or just critical praise (yes, I know, he directed the curiously beloved by many Field of Dreams, but that thing’s terrible as well as terribly overrated), it works out very well indeed for Sneakers, whose actors are clearly happy to shoulder the main load of the film, and do so with a pleasant lack of vanity.

In short: The Misfits (2021)

A bunch of, well, misfits on a Robin Hood trip (Nick Cannon, Jamie Chung, Rami Jaber and Mike Angelo) attempt to rope experienced conman Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan) into their newest project of stealing terrorist gold. Even though his archenemy Schultz (Tim Roth) is involved with the terrorists, Pace is rather reticent doing anything for no monetary gain. Fortunately he changes his mind when he learns that his estranged do-gooder daughter Hope (Hermione Corfield) is part of the gang. So, after more than half an hour of feet dragging, a heist does eventually ensue.

Poor old Renny Harlin’s newest movie The Misfits has some major problems. Harlin himself isn’t one of them – while this isn’t one of his more interesting and stylish directing jobs, he does his best to get picture postcard shots of Dubai, Pierce Brosnan and the two or three fast cars that were in the budget.

Alas, he has to work from a terrible script by Kurt Wimmer and Robert Henny (who both have written some terrible films in their time, with a couple of decent ones sprinkled in) that seems to have little idea on how to properly structure and pace a heist movie. Sure, as with nearly every heist film made in the last decade or so, the Fast and Furious films have clearly become structural models, so one can’t go into a film like this expecting old school heist movie beats, but if you aim for being a big fat action heist movie with cars, you actually need to deliver the action early and often and find a way to sandwich the character work in-between. The Misfits seems to have been made in the belief that such a thing is easy, and so of course drags when it should move and moves when it should take a breather. It certainly doesn’t help that the film can’t actually afford big set pieces, and is simply not clever enough to then come up with clever ones it can actually afford.

Instead, there’s quite a bit of absolutely terrible comedy, drab character work, and a heist without tension with “twists” you can at best shrug about.

There’s also the little problem that an ensemble movie like this actually needs a fully capable ensemble: while Brosnan is certainly not unwilling to work, he also seems rather too conscious he is slumming. Chung and Corfield are perfectly decent presences throughout, at least. Roth – the villain with the most screen time and theoretically a great actor for this sort of material -seems too bored to do much whatsoever, and Cannon’s performance is simply terrible, not just because he has to deliver most of the “funny” lines (though that certainly isn’t helping). Angelo and Jaber for their parts are just kinda there, doing nothing any man-shaped piece of cardboard couldn’t do just as well. All of which makes it rather difficult to root for or against anyone here.

In short: Action Man (1967)

Original title: Le soleil des voyous

After a pretty successful career as a criminal (mostly in Indochina, it seems), Denis Farrand (Jean Gabin) has retired into the more or less straight life as a club and restaurant owner, married a woman who wouldn’t approve of his getting back to his old business, and is getting bored out of his mind. A plan to rob the payroll of the US forces in France is percolating in his brain – it’s one of those opportunities that just drops into a guy’s lap – but he’s not quite bored enough yet to act on it.

That changes when Farrand’s refusal to allow the underlings of the local crime bosses to sell drugs in his restaurant leads to a reunion with his old good buddy and crony Jim Beckley (Robert Stack). Which is to say, Beckley is part of the group of goons sent to convince Farrand otherwise, but obviously changes his mind on seeing his old buddy in trouble. With a partner, the whole bank and payroll thing looks too tempting to resist, particularly since Farrand’s plan is pretty great.

So great, the heist itself isn’t what goes wrong in this particular heist movie – it’s the aftermath, when said local crime bosses as well as a female partner the deeply misogynist Farrand never wanted (Margaret Lee) start making trouble that’s going to be the problem here.

The English language title for Jean Delannoy’s heist movie is pretty damn absurd – neither the now apparently touchable Robert Stack nor Jean Gabin in his 60s are any kind of action men (though giving that epithet to Gabin at this stage in his career is rather funny), and the film only has a couple of scenes that would qualify as action scenes. In truth, this is a calm, focussed and collected heist movie that stages its (pretty imaginative and fun) heist with the same precision it uses to portray an aftermath that sees the result of Gabin’s calm calculations destroyed by all of those pesky little human things like emotions and plain stupidity.

On the way, we get quite a few scenes of Gabin doing that curious Gabin thing where phlegmatic acting suddenly feels as if it were incredibly emotionally expressive, some neat variations on gangster movie standards, as well as one of the finer bloodless heists I’ve seen on screen. There’s also a thematic line running through the film – embodied in Gabin’s Farrand as well as Lee’s Betty - where boredom is the true enemy of happiness, the inability to live a boring life like everybody else (when they’re lucky) leading to doom and destruction.

In short: Collectors (2020)

Original title: 도굴

Warning: vague spoilers ahead!

Kang Dong-goo (Lee Je-hoon) is highly talented grave robber, specialising in plundering archaeological sites with the help of his foster father and his foster sister. He’s a bit of a curious example of his kind, though, giving away whatever money he gets for the stolen goods. He is clearly trying to get into the good books of a very specific collector of illegal archaeological goods and his assistant Se-hee (Shin Hye-sun). Eventually, Dong-goo manages to achieve that goal, and finds himself tasked with stealing a mythical sword hidden in a Joseon era tomb situated right in the middle of Seoul. Fortunately, he has already acquired the help of a rogue archaeologist going by the moniker of Dr Jones (Jo Woo-jin) and the best digger around (Im Won-hee). Now there’s only the little problem of escaping the tender mercies of a tenacious cop, a gangster boss and the collector he’s working for. Well, that’s before we get to Dong-goo’s actual plans.

Because Park Jung-bae’s Collectors isn’t just a grave-robbing heist movie but actually a classic caper movie where a rich bastard gets his just deserts courtesy of a former victim using his own greed against him, this way also a vengeance movie without a climactic killing. In my books, that’s one of the more satisfying genre combinations imaginable, and a filmmaker would truly need to go out of their way to ruin this sort of film for me.

Park certainly doesn’t ruin anything, instead using a slick visual style for a playful jaunt through all kinds of genre standards and tropes, changing an element here and there, and presenting it all well-timed and with (mostly, apart from one somewhat problematic scene) very good humour, never lingering at any set piece or idea too long for the audience to notice their implausibility or for it to become boring. The humour is broad but effective, the set pieces are clever and fun, and the heist – once we realize what it actually is - is rather delightful and fitting to its victims.

Collectors wins quite a few extra points by admitting that stealing cultural treasures is actually a pretty shitty thing to do – something quite a few films of its genres tend to downplay so as not to make their heroes look bad – and using this as part of its plot as well as to make its happy end even happier, which makes a very satisfying piece of popcorn cinema even more satisfying.

In short: The Score (2001)

Aging thief Nick (Robert De Niro), looking at retirement to be with his younger girlfriend (Angela Bassett) and manage his ill-gotten jazz club is going on one last, risky, heist together with an ableist newbie (Edward Norton) who has ingratiated himself with the thief’s main contact (Marlon Brando). Said contact will turn out to have problems of his own beyond looking as unhealthy as early 00s Brando. Still, nothing you won’t see coming a mile or two away occurs.

The whole affair looks and feels a lot as if director Frank Oz was really trying to make a Michael Mann movie, but failing, ending up with the artistic ambitions and slickness of Mann’s style and none of the intelligence and depth these things are supposed to stand in service of, and which make the difference between artistic ambitions and simple pretentiousness.

The script (with four people credited for story and screenplay, which is seldom a good sign in the sort of major mainstream movie where this means there were probably ten writers involved) lacks any nuance, any sense for the telling detail, that could drag the obvious clichés in more interesting directions, leaving the actors to go through the motions. And sure, De Niro and Norton going through the motions is not exactly boring to watch, but it’s also a painful underuse of their talents.

The script has other flaws: the motive for the final – and so obvious it’s not a spoiler – betrayal is underprepared even though the film’s about half an hour too long for what it is, the pacing’s off (a cardinal sin in this genre), and I don’t even want to know who thought having Norton go undercover as a “retard” (that’s a quote) was anything but an idea to make a viewer cringe.

Despite the flaws, it’s still a watchable film, even though it is only the kind of watchability that comes with a cast and crew made up out of experienced professionals doing their jobs professionally.

In short: The Doberman Gang (1972)

Supposed criminal mastermind Eddie (Byron Mabe), is deeply disappointed with the way his last bank robbing plan worked out. According to Eddie, it’s always going wrong because humans are fallible. If only he had robots to do his robbing for him.

Instead of robots, he eventually stumbles upon the idea of using dogs, Dobermans to be precise, to do his banking business for him. Which might suggest his earlier plans failed not because the flawed state of humanity, but because he’s an idiot. As the rest of the film will demonstrate, there’s that as well has his inherent dickish inability to treat his human gang properly, always thinking himself to be a great psychological manipulator but really not getting the simplest thing about people right.

Director Byron Chudnow really must have liked Dobermans, for this is only the first of three films about dogs getting roped into robbery. I do understand the attraction of the idea at least in part, for the dogs are certainly much more convincing actors here than most of their human colleagues. Well, at least Julie Parrish playing Eddie’s underpaid moll is on their level.

As far as heist movies go, you have to admire the merry absurdity of The Doberman Gang, Chudnow taking his basic idea as seriously as he can get away with. The film does take place in a pretty absurd world too, where people only notice half a dozen Dobermans strolling into a bank once they start robbing it; bonus points here to the extras doing various, perfectly appropriate “WTF!?” expressions once the robbery gets on its way.

It’s not all silly gold here, though, for whenever there’s no dog action, the viewer has to cope with some pretty bland heist movie tropes staged just as blandly. A situation that is certainly not improved by Mabe’s performance as Eddie. Alas, he lacks the charisma, the charm and the viciousness of your typical dog, and is certainly not the material a mastermind even in a semi-comedic heist movie should be made of.

Chudnow’s direction only truly comes to life when he’s shooting the animals, the rest of the action is staged indifferently, with little sense for the intricacies of human interactions and their dramatic portrayal. The best he seems to be able to do is milk the film’s horrible and painfully catchy title song until we can get back to the doggy business.

In short: Vabank II, czyli riposta (1985)

aka Point of No Return

Warsaw, 1936. After two years of jail time, ex-bank owner and still scumbag Kramer (Leonard Pietraszak) escapes with the help of former prison mate Edek Sztyc (Bronislaw Wroclawski) and his associates. He still has a nice Swiss bank account to pay for this sort of thing, it turns out. While Sztyc would really rather make his way to Switzerland with Kramer as quickly as possible, his new employer won’t leave Poland until he has taken his revenge on safe cracker and criminal mastermind Henryk Kwinto (Jan Machulski), who tricked him into prison in the first movie.

Kwinto has actually retired now and moved to the country with Marta (Ewa Szykulska) and her little daughter, but when Kramer and his associates begin trying to kill him and his old associates – who have now gone into the movie business – something has to be done. That this something will eventually turn into a rather complicated yet fun plot to thwart Kramer shouldn’t surprise anyone.

I don’t love the second Vabank movie – again directed by Juliusz Machulski and bringing back the complete main cast of the first film - quite as much as the first one. That’s mostly a question of pacing here: despite actually being ten minutes or so shorter Vabank II feels quite a bit slower and includes, mostly in its first half, a couple scenes that simply slow things down too much for my taste. Particularly the black face (yeah, I don’t know either) musical number with the title song performed by Jacek Chmielnik seems to be completely useless to the film and could be excised for pace as well as good taste, but generally, the film does simply take a bit too long to get going.

However, once it does, Vabank II does come into its own rather well. This is not one of those sequels that simply try to copy the first movie but really stands in dialogue with it, mirroring and commenting on the first film but going its own way when it wants and needs to. The cast is still very fun to watch, and Kwinto’s eventual plot is still constructed with wit and a light hand, with funny and clever little ideas coming up with nice regularity. The only people who die here are still professional killers, everyone else gets their comeuppance in other, perfectly appropriate ways, and things wrap up with a grin by middle-aged men who aren’t arseholes. The film even takes care to give its characters an actual happy end, which isn’t that easy in a movie set in Poland this close to the Nazi invasion, but which I appreciated quite a bit.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Somewhere in the US Midwest. A cucumber-cool criminal we’ll call Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), a nom de plume bestowed on him by the newspapers in lieu of his actual name, has to leave his hideout position as a preacher rather hastily when two former associates (Geoffrey Lewis and George Kennedy) find him and try to murder him. We will later learn it is all on account of a misunderstanding, as well as the George Kennedy character being one of those “shoot first, ask questions never” guys, but right now, Thunderbolt is lucky to stumble into the arms, well, freshly stolen car of a young gentleman who goes by the name of Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges).

Lightfoot, apart from being a bit of a smartass, is also perfectly willing to help a guy out, so he and Thunderbolt go on a bit of a road trip together. Their of course ensuing misadventures lead to a friendship between the two despite their differences in age – Thunderbolt’s a Korea vet, Lightfoot most certainly not – and temperament. Eventually, Thunderbolt manages to convince his – by now their – pursuers that there’s really no reason to murder one another, and everybody teams up to rob the same bank whose first robbery got Thunderbolt his name.

Apart from Quentin Tarantino, I can hardly imagine many directors living today trying to make something comparable to this comedic road movie/serious bank heist film by Michael Cimino. Current scriptwriting dogma (which is, as dogmas tend to be, wrong) would never accept a film giving itself so much time and its characters so much room to breathe before an actual plot sets in, for one, and where’s the hero’s journey in here!?

Of course, the film’s relaxed pacing, its loose yet thematically coherent structure and Cimino’s willingness to let the audience learn what his characters are about by simply letting us watch them in various interactions with one another and the slightly eccentric or crazy characters peopling this America are not exactly en vogue today either. Instead of that one inciting incident that explains everything about a character, this is a film about guys – alas in classic New Hollywood style there’s little room for female characters here – whose characters and personality have accrued over time in a way that makes flashbacks superfluous. You simply wouldn’t get at the cores of these people that way.

Which can also be a bit frustrating to a viewer in the 2020s, of course, when we get no actual background about Lightfoot at all, simply because he’s a bit of an innocent who hasn’t accrued all the damage and lifetime of the other men, and we are watching him in the process of doing so.

Cimino’s great at this phase of the film, too, providing ample space for Eastwood and Bridges to do their things, yet also filling the space around them with things and people of interest, as well as many beautiful location shots (cinematography is by Frank Stanley) for everyone to be dwarfed by. People being dwarfed by landscape seems to be rather important for the film’s, perhaps Cimino’s, worldview also, fitting a sensibility that’s not quite nihilist yet certainly contains the sort of absurdist view of peoples’ place in the world it very well might end up there later (spoiler alert: it does), even though right now, it treats its own view of the world still as a bit of a joke. Particularly the ending, when a very good turn of fate comes with a very unfair price, points rather obviously in that direction.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t exclusively a loose road movie, though, and once the bank heist plot starts in earnest, it and its director show they can do tight as well as loose, presenting a grubby, often funny but also focussed and actually exciting heist that packs everything what I want from a good heist movie into about half of its running time, until things become very 70s indeed.


All of this combines into a film that stands in many ways in marked contrast to the structure and rules obsessed style of filmmaking en vogue today (which also produces many a great movie, don’t get me wrong), suggesting exactly the kind of maverick outlaw spirit New Hollywood mythology so loves to praise this era of filmmaking for, through a willingness to simply let its hair down.

Vabank (1981)

Warsaw, 1934. Famed/infamous – depending on which side of the law you find yourself – safe cracker and trumpet player Henryk Kwinto (Jan Machulski) is released from jail after a six year stint for a crime he actually didn’t commit. He was framed by his comrade Gustaw Kramer (Leonard Pietraszak), a man obviously lacking the code of ethics Kwinto prides himself on.

Kramer has hit it big in the last few years and now owns his very own bank, a position he gladly uses to con whomsoever has the misfortune of encountering him in business, while pretending to be an upstanding member of society. Kramer is pretty nervous about the whole situation with Kwinto, and tries to pay him off with a not terribly impressive sum.

The safe cracker at first still takes the money after nearly losing his composure (Kramer’s just that kind of a guy), having decided on a life inside the law now, so the revenge Kramer so fears isn’t really in the cards. Or it wouldn’t be, until Kwinto learns that Kramer has murdered a friend of his, a fellow musician/criminal, making it look like suicide to boot so that the man’s widow Marta (Ewa Szykulska) and her little daughter haven’t even gotten any life insurance money to survive on.

That’s a bit more than Kwinto is willing to accept from Kramer, so he recruits two young brothers only too happy to work with him (Krzysztof Kiersznowski and Jacek Chmielnik) and an old partner of his, Dunczyk (Witold Pyrkosz). Together, they are going to pay a little visit to Kramer’s supposedly absolutely secure bank vault, also setting in motion a larger plan of a certain delicious irony.

Quite a few details of Juliusz Machulski’s Vabank, beginning with its nature as a period piece, its use of music, character names and not ending with its general tone that mixes the comedic with the surprisingly earnest with elegance and style, have a marked resemblance to George Roy Hill’s The Sting, not in the way of a rip-off, but as a model to use or not use depending on the situation in thoughtful and effective ways, and certainly as a sibling in spirit.

It’s also a nice demonstration that the caper/heist movie genre is part of an international language that can’t be held back by piddling things like Iron Curtains. It’s not wonder, really, for the basic elements of these films – which Vabank all uses exceptionally well – are exactly the kind of thing any sane person will enjoy: clever people committing mostly non-violent crime in clever and movie plot complicated ways while whistling or trumpeting a tune; crime that’s generally committed on those people who deserve, nay, need to be taken down a peg (Kramer being a particularly egregious example of such a guy); plotting that is intricate and escapes showing that it is rather silly in realm-world terms via a tone of frothy lightness; main characters who walk through the places of the rich, the poor, and the in-between like trickster gods in a good mood; an idea of crime as a method to achieve justice that goes back to at least Robin Hood; and an admiration for skill but first and foremost cleverness and the ability to outwit a film’s antagonist. Package all this with the right pacing and the right actors, and you have the sort of thing movies were invented for.


In Vabank’s case, it’s not terribly difficult to think that the general disrespect it has for authority - given a more palatable taste for censors by turning this into a period piece and giving the villain that most capitalist of jobs, banker, I suppose – must have struck a special chord with Polish audiences, yet doing so in a way that’s not painful and serious but light and fun. The film certainly strikes a chord with me, not just because it includes all the expected elements of its sub-genre, and includes them so well, but because it also adds things of its own, small echoes of Polish history, and moments of melancholy seriousness whenever it treats Kwinto’s view of the world and his position as a man slowly aging out of his best years without having much to show for it that never get in the way of the lightness but enhance and deepen the films silliest moments by contrast, making the lightness feel more honest and earned.

In short: The Italian Job (1969)

Freshly out of prison, small time-ish yet highly aspirational criminal mastermind Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) inherits a plan for stealing a whole lot of gold in Turin from a friend murdered by the Mafia. It’s a bit of a crazy undertaking, but Charlie manages to talk hilariously posh underworld king (you can take that literally) Mr Bridger (Noël Coward – yes, that Noël Coward) into financing the somewhat crazy plan. So it’s off to Italy with a bunch of people mostly without personality to outfox the police as well as the mafia and get rich.

Even in 1969, films about cars that go really fast had a bit of a problem with filling the parts that were not about car chases. Peter Collinson’s film decides to go around that particular problem by being a car chase caper movie, which is a decent enough idea at its core. Alas, in this concrete case, the non car-chase parts – aka two thirds of the movie – are just not a terribly good caper movie.

For one, the quality of the jokes – even if you forget contemporary sensibilities and pretend it is still 1969 – is highly variable, tending to the unfunny, and for every actually funny bit like Caine’s bone-tired facial expression after he has bedded the half a dozen or so prostitutes his girlfriend gifts him as a “coming out present” (I did mention we need to forget our contemporary sensibilities, right?), there are two that fall down flat with an audible “thud”. Though I’m sure Benny Hill’s (sigh) pervy Professor with a weight fetish would have been hilarious once, in the music hall. The film also has the tendency to drag jokes that are funny for the first two or three times out way too often, and at first genuinely funny business like Mr Bridger’s royal poshness is getting just a bit tedious through the power of repetition, though Coward seems to amuse himself just fine.

As a caper movie, the film suffers under a particularly slow middle act, with planning and experimentation that never feel like anything but a way for the film to fill out the running time. Adding to the plight of this tedious part of the film is the inexplicable decision to surround Caine – who is cool even when he’s silly, fortunately – with a large amount of helpers who have no discernible character traits that could make things more interesting whatsoever, so apart from Caine, Mr Bridger, the self-explanatory Camp Freddie (Tony Beckley) and the unfortunate pervy prof, there are a dozen or so completely interchangeable guys around, doing little but take up screen space.

On the plus side, once the heist finally, after a long long long long time, starts, it’s actually pretty damn fun, with some ingenious moments and direction by Collinson that finally gets the tone of light but actual excitement the first two acts were crying out for right.


That’s car chase movies for ya.

Three Films Make A Post: Takes a killer to make one

Ocean’s Eight (2018): As with the Soderbergh Ocean’s films, this all-female spin-off directed by Gary Ross is a technically very accomplished heist movie. It also suffers from the same main problem as its brother movies: it’s not as smart as it clearly thinks it is and never stops congratulating itself for it. Turns out Soderbergh’s smugness is infectious.

However, what this one mostly made me think of are the horrors of Hollywood’s obsession with youth as beauty, particularly in women, and its habit to push aging actresses into what borders on self-mutilation based on the insane assumption that not being able to move her face anymore while looking like some sort of moving doll on the wrong side of the uncanny valley is a lesser problem for an actress than having a couple of wrinkles like actual human beings do. I’m also pretty miffed that all the all-female Ocean’s film is able to is make me think of the way its protagonists look.

Proxy Killer (2018): But enough of that. How about a perfectly fine low budget thriller instead? Scott (Charlie Babcock) survived an encounter with a serial killer his wife didn’t. Making his first step into self-help groups, he meets the mysterious O (Mandy Amano) who easily draws out the killer in him. Even though it is easy enough even early on to see where Kyle Downes’s film is going, the focussed presentation and convincing performances by Babcock and Amano keep things going effectively until the pleasantly logical conclusion.

Look Away (2018): Less focussed and less consequent is Assaf Bernstein’s tale about bullied eighteen-year old Maria (India Eisley) coping with an emotionally abusive family by trading places with her much more confident but alas evil mirror image. Thematically and visually, there’s a lot to like here, and India Eisley’s, as well as Mira Sorvino’s and Jason Isaacs’s performances are fine. The execution, however, flounders repeatedly, first making Maria’s environment just a little too horrible to credit, and then expecting the audience to care when Maria’s mirror image provides these nasty caricatures torturing our heroine with their comeuppance. A bit more subtlety, and a couple of human traits for everyone involved would probably have worked wonders there.


The film also suffers under the contemporary obsession with giving everything a backstory, so Maria’s mirror personality is of course not just a supernatural or psychological projection of her desires but the spirit of her dead twin her father apparently killed directly after their birth because she was deformed. See what I meant about subtlety and the lack thereof?

In short: The Hard Word (2002)

aka The Australian Job

Scott Roberts’s film is a highly peculiar, and pretty singular film. At first, the whole thing does give the impression of being an Australian version of one of those pseudo-Tarantino films of this era that seldom went anywhere interesting or worthwhile. However, the longer the whole thing goes, the clearer it becomes that this may be built out of the well-worn bits and pieces of any old film about smart-talking gangsters, a bit of noir, and the bones of heist and jailbreak films, yet it treats these elements in so individual a way they become things that belong to it alone.

The plot, at once episodic, straightforward and complicated concerns the brothers Twentyman. Dale (Guy Pearce) is the clever one with a big L love for his sometimes traitorous wife Carol (Rachel Griffiths), Shane (Joel Edgerton) the pretty and perhaps not terribly clever one with the mother complex. and Mal (Damien Richardson), the scruffy yet sensitive one. Right now, they are sitting in prison, but thanks to a financial arrangement between their lawyer Frank Malone (Robert Taylor), some cops and the warden of their prison, they are regularly snuck out to commit bloodless heists, brilliantly planned by Dale. Theoretically, they should get out any day now, but Frank really rather seems to like how they earn money he then “keeps secure” for them and can’t really do anything about it; he also has an affair with Carol that he takes rather seriously.

Various developments will eventually lead to a pretty bad heist and the brothers going on the run.

Because this is such an individual film, I am pretty sure The Hard Word isn’t a film everyone is going to enjoy. The immense tonal shifts happening not just between scenes but during them often are quite radical and certainly not always lead into directions everybody will be willing or able to follow. The film also packs about as much stuff (and plot) into a normal feature length as two seasons of your favourite Netflix show. It shouldn’t hold together at all, but to my eyes it is carried by both Roberts’s stylish direction that makes these shifts often feel much more consistent than they should, and an acting ensemble (Rachel Griffiths as Pearce’s complicated wife deserves a special mention besides the male main trio here) whose approach shifts right with the film while never giving the viewer the feeling she’s not watching the same people. I’d even argue these seeming shifts in the characters are closer to the way actual people are, and the film does indeed use them to emphasise the elements in its characters’ personalities that do not change with their situations, revealing their cores clearer than a more obvious and direct approach might.


The film’s humour, and its often playful approach to clichés is rather wonderful, too, often seemingly making a beeline towards the most cynical idea possible but then using various techniques to not necessarily soften but complicating this, finding moments of perfect sweetness in a film about sweary, sweaty men committing exciting crimes.