Heist Movie Genre: 13 Iconic Heist Movies

A heist movie is a film that focuses on a large-scale robbery or series of robberies that require elaborate planning and ingenuity to pull off. Heist movies often feature a protagonist who works with members of the heist team—a crew that the protagonist assembles for the heist.

Some critics make a distinction between heist movies and capers, noting that the latter term refers to a more general kind of crime adventure that’s more lighthearted. While some heist movies are also comedies, they generally are more serious, even hard-boiled.

Throughout the history of heist movies, tropes have shifted, and new ideas and emotional beats came to predominate the genre.

• Early beginnings: Many film critics and scholars date the origin of the heist movie genre to the 1950 film The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston. At that point, many crime movies in Hollywood and internationally were adapted from crime books, often detective or pulp novels.
• Central tropes: In 1955, director Jules Dassin made Rififi about a meticulously executed jewel robbery, which further established the genre’s central tropes.
• Hays Production Code: One of the most salient changes of the genre involved the success of the depicted heists due to the Hays Production Code, which set fairly strict content guidelines from 1934 to 1968. During this time, it was common for depictions of heists to end in failure.
• Diminished censorship: With the relaxation of censorship in 1968 and onward, it became more common for the heists to succeed and for the protagonists to be presented in a more straightforwardly positive manner. In The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill, the protagonists (played by Robert Redford and Paul Newman) are affable, charming thieves who go after an unambiguously bad guy.
• Subgenres: By the time of the rise of American independent cinema in the 1990s, variations and subversions of the heist genre had become common. The plots tended to focus more on the nature of the relationships between the characters. Point Break (1991), directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is an example of a heist film with an action-sports angle—the criminals are practitioners of extreme sports like surfing and skydiving, which explains their thrill-seeking motivation and exceptional skills.

Even as the genre has changed over time, there are common characteristics and sequences in heist movies. Some of the best heist movies include the following elements:

1. 1. Assembling the crew: Heists are a team effort, and there tends to be a section in heist films about the assembly of the crew. Usually, it’s through the coming together of disparate individual criminals, each with their own set of unique skills. Personal rivalries, weaknesses, or deceptions can also cause the whole enterprise to topple. Many times, the crew members will know each other from previous jobs, as in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven.
2. 2. Planning the heist: Heist films hinge upon the idea of technical precision and virtuosic talent. In most cases, the assembled crew members will be the best at their particular skill: safe-cracking, security system disabling, driving fast getaway vehicles, weapons, and so on. The planning phase allows the filmmakers to give the audience a preview of the heist plan, generating anticipation and clarifying things that might, later on, be complicated by unforeseen circumstances. It’s common for these planning sequences to be edited in montages: a series of quick shots of the action, cut rhythmically and often to music, showing the crew making their preparations. Fast Five (2011), directed by Justin Lin, features a number of these sequences.
3. 3. Executing the heist: These sequences are often the climax of their respective films. The execution is the payoff for the preparation and tends to involve something unexpected occurring. This can take the shape of something as simple as tripping an unexpected alarm, or the betrayal of the whole heist by a duplicitous team member. Some heist films, such as Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), exploit this for great comedic effect.
4. 4. The aftermath: In pre-Hays Code heist films, the heist’s aftermath was typically an unraveling with the theft failing, characters getting caught or killed, and crew members escaping the law without the desired fortune. In more recent films, the heist usually succeeds. The plot then pivots to the resolution of conflicts between the characters and the tying of any loose ends.

As a well-established genre, heist movies include a varied range of examples:

1. 1. Heat (1955): This Michael Mann epic involves a cop (Al Pacino) trying to take down a crew of bank robbers and their leader (Robert De Niro). It features several pulse-quickening setpieces, including the climactic heist itself.
2. 2. Ronin (1998): This heist film stars Robert De Niro as the de-facto leader of a highly trained group of ex-special forces operatives who have turned to robbery to pay their bills. Directed by John Frankenheimer, Ronin is known for some of cinema’s most effectively filmed car chases.
3. 3. The Killing (1956): An early work from director Stanley Kubrick, The Killing features Sterling Hayden as the gang’s mastermind and ringleader. Kubrick uses multiple perspectives to tell the story of the heist and of the characters who make up the crew. It also features what would become a ubiquitous trope in the genre—a career criminal doing “one last job” before retirement.
4. 4. Ocean’s Eleven (1960): This 1960 film directed by Lewis Milestone was a remake of Bob le Flambeur and Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 classic, which features a casino heist and an aging gambler fresh out of jail. In Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of the film, the characters’ interplay balances drama with comedy.
5. 5. Bottle Rocket (1996): Wes Anderson’s directorial debut is a reinterpretation of many heist film conventions. The characters have big dreams and no desire to hurt anyone, and their naivete is their biggest liability.
6. 6. Inside Man (2006): Director Spike Lee’s take on the heist genre features several surprising elements. Set around an apparent bank robbery in New York City, it includes the perspective of a detective (Denzel Washington) as he tries to figure out the exact nature of a heist. The detective acts as an audience surrogate as the story is told in retrospect.
7. 7. The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, this feature follows a rich playboy who executes heists for amusement. It represents a high-gloss take on the heist film, showcasing the technical and romantic thrills that come with a high-flying international criminal lifestyle. The Thomas Crown Affair was directed by John McTiernan.
8. 8. The Italian Job (1969): The British original, directed by Peter Collinson, and F. Gary Gray’s 2003 American remake both include iconic Mini Cooper car chases, but the remake is more about revenge than monetary gain.
9. 9. Reservoir Dogs (1992): The main twist of Quentin Tarantino’s film is that the central heist occurs entirely offscreen. The plot instead focuses on the aftermath of the job, which has gone terribly wrong.
10. 10. The Usual Suspects (1995): This film, directed by Bryan Singer, is another example of a 1990s heist movie that places the heist itself in the background. The film is a reexamination of the spectacularly destructive aftermath and the search for the man who seems to be pulling every string.
11. 11. Inception (2010): Christopher Nolan’s feature finds the mastermind protagonist—a sophisticated thief played by Leonardo DiCaprio—stealing information from inside people’s heads.
12. 12. The Town (2010): The Town, starring and directed by Ben Affleck, follows a few bank heists in Boston led by two rough-and-tumble bank robbers (Affleck and Jeremy Renner) with differing opinions about their partnership. An FBI agent (Jon Hamm) pursues the robbers.
13. 13. Baby Driver (2017): Edgar Wright’s take on the heist film focuses on an unusual member of the standard heist crew: the getaway driver. This film is brisk and stylized and also features a central romance.

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