OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Not awful but nowhere near as good as it should have been.

Details: Starring Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo and Danny DeVito. Directed by David Mamet. Rated R for language and sexual content. One hour, 47 minutes.

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Review: It used to be that the only thing wrong with David Mamet's fiendishly clever movies was his love-is-blind insistence on casting his second wife, Rebecca Pidgeon.

She's as bad as ever in “Heist,” but this time she's not the problem. Gene Hackman is. Or, more accurately, the combination of Hackman and Mamet. One's a great actor, the other's a great filmmaker. You'd expect their collaboration to set off cinematic sparks. It does not.

Hackman's certainly not bad. Has he ever been, even in “The Poseidon Adventure”? But he's not a Mamet actor like William H. Macy or Joe Mantegna. Conversely, this is not Mamet's sharpest writing. He seems more concerned with the mechanics of the heist than with the people doing the job (though he still gets off some good Mametisms; Joe on wife Fran: “She could talk her way out of a sunburn”).

Hackman plays Joe Moore, a longtime — and very good — master thief who's considering retirement. When a bank security camera catches him without a mask during a robbery, he considers it an omen. And a blessing. Now he can take his custom-built boat and his custom-built young wife (Pidgeon) “down south.” But his longtime fence (Danny DeVito) has other ideas. In typical Mamet fashion, there are twists, turns and fake-outs galore. Watching Joe and the rest of his team (Delroy Lindo and Ricky Jay) pull off their scams is good fun.

Still, something's off. The movie doesn't spin along as effortlessly as Mamet's “The Spanish Prisoner” or “State and Main.” It needs a tuneup. One final flaw. It's easy enough to care about Joe. Hackman invests him with old pro know-how and a craggy charm. But it's not so easy to care about Fran. Or Joe and Fran as a couple, which is crucial to the story.

“Heist” may hook you for a while, and it's never uninteresting. But there's no getting around it. It just isn't the movie it should have been. Drat.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)