However, after pulling off the final job (spoiler alert), he realizes that his fence has no intention of letting him walk away, and that his money is tied up in malls/businesses/etc. Caan's character pursues the idealized version of success in America, awkwardly courting a trophy wife he barely knows and then desperately "buying" a child (I'm not joking - that's in the movie). I think it's actually a metaphor for "The American Dream" and the struggle for individual agency in a system that treats people like cogs in a machine. However, at risk of sounding like a pretentious douche, I would argue that it actually has a lot more substance than the typical heist movie.
From a pure entertainment value standpoint, it's probably one of the weaker films on this list. On the surface, it's a fairly stock heist film without much depth or many unique elements. Most Underrated Heist Movie - Thief (1981) On a somewhat random note, you could also call it the middle movie in Edward Norton's scumbag trilogy from this era, as it occurred to me that he plays almost the exact same character in Rounders (1999), The Score (2001), and The Italian Job (2003). It has most of the stock plot beats and De Niro is perfect as the jaded career thief. If you've never seen a heist movie before and you want to know what this sub-genre is all about, I would argue that nothing embodies it better than The Score (2001) even though it isn't the best heist movie. Most Prototypical Heist Movie - The Score (2001) Honorable Mention: Reservoir Dogs (1992) manages to be extremely entertaining despite cutting out the actual heist and focusing instead on the planning and getaway, with calculated temporal jumps and flashbacks that add to the narrative potency. Hats off to Nolan for doing something bold and fresh with the genre. It's basically every heist movie cliche grafted onto an extremely imaginative and creative setting, and it absolutely works. It has all of the hallmark traits and tropes of the genre: the job gone bad, the jaded career thief trying to pull off one last improbable heist, the "assemble your crew" collection of specialists, the elevated stakes (they'll be trapped in dreams for an eternity if they fail), the troublesome moll who threatens to unravel the whole job (literally named Moll), and the unexpectedly difficult defenses (Cillian Murphy's mind has been trained to resist manipulation, which adds unexpected obstacles). If you don't think Inception is a heist movie, look closer. Most Creative Heist Movie - Inception (2010) I enjoyed almost all of these movies, but some made a bigger impression than others. I really enjoy this sub-genre of movie, and it was fun to watch so many of them (re-watch in most cases) and evaluate their mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses. I went on a spree this summer that included: