The Art of the Steal

Heist movies are almost always good, and this one is no exception. Plus, Kurt Russell's a naturally likable dude, who starts the movie spending 5.5 years in a Polish prison because his brother (Matt Dillon) sold him out after getting pinched due to his own massive stupidity and greed.

These movies all revolve around the double-cross, who's trying it, and how, and whether their potential victim has in fact double-crossed them, and which double-cross was more effective, and so on. The catch to that is, at the end of the movie, it has to explain the successful double-cross, and that risks bringing the movie to a screeching halt. It's a little like the end of a detective story, when the gumshoe has to stand around and explain the whole thing to the room full of suspects. Done wrong, it can be really boring.

Art of the Steal mostly avoids this by doing using the approach of having the reveal take place as the character that's been duped slowly pieces it together. Flashbacks to conversations from earlier in the movie, only this time the camera pulls back to show the person on the other line wasn't where they were believed to be. That slowly growing horror as the character realizes everything they thought they had lined up falls apart.

The strength of the film is the dialogue. A lot of good one-liners, or lines that work because of the context. A guy with a patch over one eye and a flintlock pistol threatening Kurt Russell in the bathroom while yelling about Georges Seurat, 'the seminal French Post-Impressionalist.' There's a hapless Interpol desk jockey trying to catch them with the help of another art thief (Terence Stamp) on work release. The desk jockey ends up as the target of a lot of insults. I should probably feel bad for him, but he's such a feckless goober it's hard for me to care.