On heists

Daniel Mays and Jason Statham in The Bank Job, written by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais

As British film The Bank Job opens in America, Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times considers the enduring appeal of heist movies.

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.