Heist

Mamet -- crafts tangy, well-seasoned dialogue that a good cast can feast on. And this cast is prime.

Mamet takes exactly those qualities that we most prize in genre movies -- characters, cleverness and high style -- and refines them to a high shine.

Not only reminds us that there's a little larceny in all of us, it reminds us how much fun it can be to commune with our inner thieves.

Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

While staccato dialogue and edgy confrontations have always been the wordsmith's forte, the precision-tooled mechanics of an elaborate crime caper have not, and the physical direction here could use some muscle.

With a movie like this, there's no risk of spoiling the ending, because the entire plot is merely a formality trudging toward a foregone conclusion. The viewer's biggest challenge is to survive fits of yawning so violent they could disrupt ornithic migratory patterns.