What makes a heist movie? Film critic Stuart Kaminsky describes it simply as an “adventure-process film.” Charles Derry says that “the genre is composed of all those works which emphasize the efforts of a diverse group of criminals to pool their talents, generally under the guidance of a father figure, in order to commit a perfect crime which requires split-second timing.” In The BFI Companion to Crime, Kim Newman compares the structure to “putting-on-a-show musicals” and the “mission-that-could-shorten-the-war combat film.” Newman also delineates between a noir heist and caper movie, saying that the central figure of a noir heist is a “thuggish prole” and a caper movie hero is usually “a well-dressed, impeccably cool character.” In The Heist Film: Stealing With Style, Daryl Lee posits that there are three components to the genre: textual, syntactical, and social. The textual reading of a heist movie involves the characters: a gang leader or man of action leading team members who all have individual skills or crafts. The syntactical competent is the extraordinary robbery that involves planning and skills “often presented through special descriptive moments, elliptical montages . . . sometimes using thrilling parallel or rapid editing.” Lee goes on to contend that the third component is the most important one that binds contemporary heist films to earlier examples of the genre: the social function and social message of a heist movie. This encompasses both a “mostly likable character achieving something extraordinary from a marginalized social position” and says that the heist genre is a metaphor for film making, a reflection of art in society, and used as a template to discuss whether movies are a business or art.
In the conclusion of The Heist Film, Lee talks about Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001), its two sequels, and Soderbergh’s keynote speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2013. In his keynote, Soderbergh claims there is a difference between cinema and a movie saying, “the simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made.” Soderbergh rails against studio machinations, bemoaning the loss of cultural specificity, narrative complexity, and ambiguity. He says, specifically, “it’s not about money, it’s about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic.” Lee argues that while Soderbergh’s other films meet his definition for cinema, his heist movies are an allegory for the tension between art and commerce.
It’s interesting to note Soderbergh’s feelings about theft in his industry. In his keynote, he quotes Steve Jobs: “It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and hurts your own character.” This stands in stark contrast to the opinion of fellow director Jim Jarmusch who says, “steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination” and sidesteps any ambiguity between plagiarism, homage, reference, tribute, or reinterpretation. Ocean’s Eleven, after all, is a remake. It takes almost every aspect of the established heist syntax and synthesizes it in the most satisfying, digestible, and colorful way. The way Soderbergh shows the assembling of a team, the development of a plan, the practicing, and the final inversion of the plan has had both a noticeable influence on subsequent heist movies and couldn’t exist without the lineage of heist movies that established this language.
Ocean’s Eleven is the progenitor of the contemporary heist movies and Soderbergh hasn’t gotten bored of the genre. He returned from his post keynote “retirement” to make Logan Lucky (2017), another heist. I want to examine a franchise that pivoted to a heist movie on its fifth entry (inexplicable, considering “one last job” is antithetical to a franchise). This week on Disenfranchised, The Fast and Furious’s Fast Five (2011).
The Textual Structure
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel): A “thuggish prole” if there ever was one. The central figure of the Fast franchise. He is a mechanic, a driver, and lives his life a quarter mile at a time.
Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker): Dom’s number two, an extremely handsome ex-LAPD officer.
Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster): A stunt driver who is mostly undeserved and used for extra stakes as Brian’s pregnant girlfriend and also as Dom’s pregnant sister.
Tej Parker (Ludacris): In this movie and going forward, Tej is a technology expert. This is a new character trait.
Han Lue (Sung Kang): A character so cool they messed up the timeline of the franchise just so he could appear in movies after his character died in Tokyo Drift (2006). These timeline machinations are rendered moot when he is brought back from the dead in F9 (2021). That’s his skill, he is extremely cool.
Gisele Yashar (Gal Godot): Munitions expert, ex-mossad. She also obtains a much needed hand print on her bikini bottom. Charitably, this is an inversion of the hyper-masculinity of heist movies and a specific reference to an infrared shoe print in the original Ocean’s 11 (1960). I think it’s probably just what it sounds like, though.
Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson): Another driver? I don’t really know, this character is mostly used for comic relief.
Leo Tego (Tego Calderón) and Rico Santos (Don Omar): Two characters who essentially do the Scott Caan and Casey Affleck banter bits from the Ocean’s movies but in Spanish.
The Syntactical Structure
The team, as outlined above, plan to rob a bank vault belonging to a cartel leader named Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). Reyes has taken precautions by putting the bank vault in a police station (a textbook example of upping the stakes). The movie has reconnaissance, driving practice montages, and lots of cross cutting. Like Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting (1973), and countless other heist movies, much of what we see practiced and perfected doesn’t factor into the major beats of the actual heist. Director Justin Lin describes this phenomena: “When you’re developing it there are always two heists that you’re working on. There’s the A plot which is what they’re always trying to do that they never get to do and there’s the B plot.” Unlike any heist movie that came before it, we get to see an enormous bank vault dragged through a city by two Dodge Chargers.
The Social Function and Social Message
The Fast crew are robbing a cartel leader who has paid off the police force Rio de Janeiro. Because Mia is pregnant, the one hundred million they plan to steal will be used for all of them to start a new life (we have come a long way from the truckload of DVD players score that’s central to The Fast and the Furious [2001]). This positions our crew as noble and just, stealing from the evil rich for the poor (themselves).
This movie is blockbuster entertainment, it is appealing on a primal level—it’s not surprising that Lin comes up with action sequences by playing with toy cars (to work out the bank vault being dragged he used a Rubik’s Cube). Though the studio told him not to drive a truck into a train for the opening set piece, he did it anyway. Is this act of dissent advocating for great art over business? There is no narrative complexity or ambiguity here. Dom may be a wanted man but he is so pure of heart that he saves a police officer from being shot by cartel thugs while she’s trying to arrest him. There is some cultural specificity but it’s hollowly used to boost the worldwide box office (a Vin Diesel franchise hallmark). This particular installment grossed 626 million dollars on a 125 million dollar budget. Lin is not investigating the tension between art and business with this heist structure, necessarily, but he proves that there is some reward in studio excess. He estimates they usually need eight versions of a car for one stunt scene. In the director’s commentary he says, “At the end of the day, Hollywood cinema is the only place in the world where you can do something like that. You have all these great cinemas around the world, great films that come out of it but this is the only cinema where you can wreck two hundred cars and it’s okay. You can come up with rigs and throw people two hundred feet and it’s okay. That’s something I don’t take lightly. In fact, I try to have as much fun as possible.”
It’s easy to see in retrospect that this is the peak of the Fast franchise. Many of the sequels find our heroes on the “right” side of the law carrying out extra-judicial spy missions for shadowy government organizations. The death of Paul Walker, the unchecked and ego-driven creative control of Vin Diesel, ballooning budgets, and the almost complete abandonment of any practical effects have left the later installments rote exercises in making cars defy physics. Ego is already a major factor in Fast Five but filming an entire fight scene between Diesel and Dwayne Johnson where both actors are staged to look the same height is hilarious and good (Lin compares this scene to Robert De Niro and Al Pacino meeting in Heat [1995]). The thing the later movies are lacking is exuberance. These movies are broad, dumb soap operas. Without a doubt, they are part of “the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies” that Soderbergh talked about in his 2013 keynote but there is a beauty to an uncomplicated movie that recognizes what it is and in the fleeting emotional moments in between the fragile masculinity that drives franchise movie making. Fast Five takes three minutes out of the second act for a “million dollar quarter mile” race between Dom, Brian, Roman, and Han in stolen police cars. It is simple and stupid but watching it I feel pure joy.
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Thank you for reading. This piece has technically been “in progress” since November 2020. After abandoning it half written in 2021, it’s a relief to finally finish it. I can’t believe I didn’t use the word family once. Besides The Great Muppet Caper, do any other franchises have one entry that’s about a heist?
I have a hard time reconciling my enjoyment of this franchise with my hatred of America car culture. I will not be investigating this further.
I firmly believe that if Gal Godot hadn’t made the “Imagine” video of at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, her character would have stayed canonically dead after Fast & Furious 6 and she would not have signed on to cameo in Fast X (and, I assume, the upcoming final movie).
Disenfranchised will return.