The Hot Rock

Laid-back caper movie, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel and directed with the lightest of touches by the perennially underrated Peter Yates. There's lovely footage of early 1970s New York and Quincy Jones provides the ultra-cool soundtrack. [09 Jul 2011, p.30]

Yates paces the fast-moving thrills with precision. [25 Apr 2009, p.53]

Wittily adapted by William Goldman from a Donald E. Westlake novel, it's the best film Yates made between Bullitt and Breaking Away. [08 Aug 1999, p.10]

It's only the movie's tendency to repeat itself and to stop for unnecessary scenes of character development that keep it from being a classically pure - which is to say, totally devious - caper movie.

The dialogue is often painfully hip-cute, but the actors manage to be funny anyway.

Peter Yates’ direction and uniformly good cast partly overcome a William Goldman script [from Donald E. Westlake’s novel] that has many exciting and funny bits, but lacks a clear, unifying thrust.

Director Yates, critically hailed for BULLITT (1968), seems to have little idea what to do with Redford, and the slowest parts of the film are the scenes developing his character into someone the audience still doesn't especially care about. The rest of the film, though, is quite enjoyable as the gang commits elaborate caper after elaborate caper, always finding their objective has just eluded them.