When does a robbery become a heist? When wigs are involved? When someone produces a blueprint? When the value of the bounty tops seven figures? Or is the real tipping point a montage in which four or more people, each with a specific skill, are recruited to the sound of slap bass and glissando organ?
None of the above. Heists happen only in America. Few British movies – British crims either, presumably – dignify what they’re up to with the “h” word. Instead, they tend to opt for “job”, as in The Hatton Garden Job (a candidate for an upgrade to “heist” if ever there was one), The Bank Job (Jason Statham rents a handbag boutique to drill into the shop next door) or The Italian Job. For Brits, robberies are just jobs, no matter how long in the plotting. For Americans, they’re art.
This elevation of a scheme to steal stuff to the heights of glamour reaches its peak with the release of Ocean’s 8, a gender-switched spin-off of Ocean’s Eleven. In that film, George Clooney and pals cleaned out a casino; in this, Sandra Bullock plays Clooney’s sister, a woman who has spent five years in prison plotting how one might relieve the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a particularly posh necklace. Once free, she assembles her squad and before you can say “you’re either in or out”, they’re foxing bouncers and slipping rocks down their cleavage.
As per all heist movies, it’s sold as good harmless fun. No one gets hurt! The only loser is the insurance company! And the goons who work for them forfeited the right to sympathy when they chose their careers, right? Sure, some security guards are probably in for the chop. Ditto the techies who installed the CCTV. And yes, the person wearing the necklace is, as it happens, in for significant physical discomfort. But if eight stone-cold babes want to boost their bank balances, que sera.
But such sentiments, if they ever seemed appropriate, feel uneasy today. At a time when mobile phones and social media ensure we’re all familiar with what crime really looks like, our tolerance for embracing it as entertainment may be diminished. Likewise our indulgence of those who act as if they’re above the law. Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein – both are a bit of a cold shower for those who like to celebrate devil-may-care chutzpah.
Or is it worse? Maybe we’ve been wrong about baddies all along. The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote 75 years ago: “Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, whole fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.”
Back then, Weil’s case for the joys of the good didn’t convince. People still flocked to Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather and the complete works of Martin Scorsese. But her words may be more likely to chime with a generation raised on superheroes and suspicious about the idea of consequence-free crime.
Another heist movie, out in the autumn, suggests millennials are indeed on board. American Animals is the story of four students who tried to pilfer some rare books from a Kentucky library in 2004. They strategised for months, then blew it when met with – and this is a bit of a spoiler, I’m afraid – the moderate distress of the middle-aged librarian. Larkiness evaporates; in its place, panic and pratfalls.
American Animals feels emotionally accurate, and, in switching focus from the perpetrators to those affected, progressive. It also feels oddly un-American. The fact that few British films have “heist” in the title isn’t because they don’t contain one, but because they never go well. The point is to prick the concept of criminal audacity and turn hero to dope and victim to victor.
For my money, our finest heist film in all but name is the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers. A beautifully executed robbery – the cops even escort the loot back to the safe house – and a perfect ending, with unwitting accomplice Mrs Wilberforce the only one still standing, others undone by their incompetence, or their unwillingness to bump off a little old lady. A Very English Scandal finished in similar style: Norman Scott cuddling a pup, all those who bunglingly sought to destroy him either dead themselves or pretending to be. Crime never really pays on British screens. It’s time it was devalued in America, too.
• Catherine Shoard is a Guardian staff columnist
• This article was amended on 11 and 14 June 2018. An earlier version attributed a quote to the French politician Simone Veil from 50 years ago. This attribution has been corrected to the French philosopher Simone Weil from 75 years ago.
