There’s nothing cooler than a perfectly executed heist film. But a new kind of heist movie has emerged in recent years: the messy caper. Critic Leila Jordan looks at two such films, 'American Animals' and 'The Duke.'
In these films, there’s also a noticeable shift toward the human interest side of the story. Slick heist movies treat their characters as vehicles to go to fantastic destinations and carry out intelligent plans. The people at the heart of "American Animals" are so human they all but destroy the allure of Hollywood’s suave capers, while "The Duke" focuses more on the family at the heart of the heist than on the theft itself.
These recent adaptations of real-world events aren’t fantasies. Instead, they capture, at least in part, the messy reality of the world of art crime, one we rarely see on screen. Most art thefts in history are tales of foolish ambition. There are exceptions of course — the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, one of the largest thefts of property in history, is a dramatic story of gangsters and mystery that remains unsolved to this day. . But such instances are rare.
That’s not to say that slick heist films are amoral or inferior. There’s a lot of fun to be had with perfect plans and groups of smart people staying calm under pressure. If "Ocean’s Eleven" is on while I’m channeling surfing, I will watch the whole thing without hesitation. But the shift to messier art heist films signals there’s still a lot more to do in the genre. In bank robbery films, things often go wrong, whether it’s, "Heat" or "Point Break" .
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