The plot moves through labyrinthine levels of double-cross. Mamet loves magic, especially sleight of hand (his favorite supporting actor, Ricky Jay, is a great card artist), and the plot of ''Heist,'' like those of ''The Spanish Prisoner'' and ''House of Games,'' is a prism that reflects different realities depending on where you're standing. It also incorporates a lot of criminal craft, as in the details of the diamond robbery, which opens the movie, and the strategy for stealing gold bars from a cargo plane at the end.
When the movie played at the Venice, Toronto and Chicago film festivals, some critics disliked the details I enjoyed the most. We learn from Variety that ''some late-reel gunplay could have benefitted enormously from more stylish handling.'' This is astonishingly wrong-headed. Does Variety mean it would have preferred one of those by-the-numbers high-tech gunfights we're weary of after countless retreads? ''Stylish handling'' in a gunfight is for me another way of saying the movie's on autopilot.
What I like about the ''late-reel'' gunplay in ''Heist'' is the way some of the shooters are awkward and self-conscious; this is arguably the first gunfight of their lives. And the way DeVito dances into the path of the bullets hysterically trying to get everybody to stop shooting (''Let's talk this over!''). The precision with which Hackman says, ''He isn't gonna shoot me? Then he hadn't oughta point a gun at me. It's insincere.'' And the classical perfection of this exchange: "Don't you want to hear my last words?" "I just did." I am also at a loss to understand why critics pick on Rebecca Pidgeon. Yes, she has a distinctive style of speech which is well-suited to Mametian dialogue: crisp, clipped, colloquial. Mamet loves to fashion anachronisms for her (''You're the law West of the Pecos''). She is not intended as a slinky film noir seductress, but as a plucky kid sister-type, who can't quite be trusted. Mamet goes to the trouble of supplying us with style and originality, and is criticized because his films don't come from the cookie cutter.
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