Heist DVD

THE FLICK
Heist isn't about a heist, to be completely honest. It's about what happens about the good guys (or are they the bad guys?) actually get the money they're after. Erik (Erik David), a wanna-be tough guy, gets mixed up with drug dealer Luis (Christian Mendez) when his friend David (Tim Aslin) decides to compete directly with Luis. The only way for the two to absolve themselves of the crime is to pay an outlandish $500,000 to Luis. After David decides to take matters into his own hands, Erik enlists his brother, K (Rick Jordan, also co-writer and co-director) and a rag tag band of thieves. K sets up a plan to knock over an armored truck. But that's just the beginning.

This 2009 flick is perhaps the epitome of a "guy movie" destined for late-night pay cable stations. Jordan and co-scripter Lee Denny dispense with elements such as character development or logic in a bid to make Heist as much of an action-packed, testosterone-pumping, curse-yelling mad house as they can. And therein lies the problem, at least from a legitimate filmmaking perspective. Aside from the action, Heist provides little for the audience to latch onto. The first question to pop up is the relationship between David and Erik. Are they also brothers, or just friends? Business associates? Acquaintances? Clarifying this situation isn't necessarily essential to the storyline, yet it serves as a harbinger of things to come in the story. The script doesn't worry about defining any of the characters on screen outside of making each of them a tired stereotype. There's the loose cannon (ironically named LC, for "loose cannon"), the nerdy computer guy, the burly muscle, the turncoat, the newbie and so on. It's because of this lack of definition the film can't generate the necessary emotion or interest. In the end, who cares if Erik lives or dies when we're never given a reason to care about him?

There's an overwhelming feeling in the picture that the titular heist is a secondary thought to seeing how these personalities mesh together in a pressure cooker of a situation. Perhaps they know the limitations they were facing with the budget and opted tell a different story from the one the audience would have expected. If that's the case, then they deserve some credit for understanding what they could and could not do. The story concept they don't quite get is how to engage the audience without making the character seem like buffoons. It all goes back to the idea of caring about the people, but it's also something more. We don't necessarily need to "care" in the conventional sense about the ruffians. Rather, we have to know them in some way, to understand their motivations aside from the inevitable payday. What is LC's (Victor Dean) major malfunction causing him to point guns in everyone's face, not to mention knocking off at least one member of the gang? How about Flora (Dana Fares), K's girl and pawn in the entire plot? Paulo (Emanuel Borria), a gift from Luis foisted onto K? Each of the people inhabiting the plot are simply there to play a predefined part in the action without contributing anything of merit to it.

K, in particular, turns out to be a poor leader, at least in terms of his thrown together group here. In short, he's not able to keep them in check, continually turning his back on people he doesn't know and doesn't trust. Considering the way the third act unfolds, he should be front and center counting the take instead of having sex with Flora away from the rest of the characters. While one man shouldn't be expected to control everything around him, he is the ringmaster, so to speak, of the group. Giving these people the benefit of the doubt the first time is one thing; doing it over and over again reeks of a script meandering for something to do. It's not even a matter of not having anything to do; it's a matter of the story doing the same thing over and over again with the same characters in the starring positions. K's right hand man Ed (Edward C'Nyle Bradford) tangles with LC more than once. LC goes after hostages multiple times. Erik gets told he's a punk with no idea how to live the "lifestyle"...you get the picture.

There's a twist at the end of the movie, one that anyone should really see coming. Not because the movie does a good job of foreshadowing it, mind you. What happens is a standard cliche audiences have come to expect in this genre when the cast is comprised of not-so-good guys. The fact it literally comes out of thin air is one thing. The fact it isn't followed up on is lazy, as if Jordan and Denny are throwing elements into the script to see what sticks in hopes of creating a feature-length film instead of an episode of any generic television program. Heist employs multiple plot threads which lack anything resembling a complete arc in the story. The aforementioned Flora appears seemingly out of nowhere and leaves in basically the same way. Erik gets over David's death far too quickly, while the gunfight while the money is being counted just happens.

This is a man movie in every sense of the word and, for the intended audience, it may do the job. That's not to disparage an audience more concerned with guns, cursing and sex. It's to say Jordan and Denny (and Jordan's co-director Richard Cooper) might be onto something here, catering specifically to their audience and foregoing everyone else. See, as much as Heist is interested in throwing divergent personalities together in the same powder keg, it's more interested in being loud, brash and crowd pleasing, serving one audience at the expense of all the others. Not that this movie needs to be touchy-feely or create complex, three-dimensional characters. It just needs to do what it wants to do well. And that's something that can't be faked.

THE LOOK
Heist is presented in anamorphic format, complete with all manner of issues. The entire film, including the outdoor day scenes, come off darker than they reasonably should, though I don't believe this is a problem with the transfer. Outdoor night scenes appear milky throughout the picture, as if a light coat of Elmer's glue had been applied to the screen. There's a fair amount of pixelation and blockiness in various objects, especially in the dark. Unfortunately for the finished film, a majority of the action takes place in darker locales which has the unintended consequence of magnifying the problems. No element jumps off the screen in any meaningful way, leading to a grungy, underground, low budget look.

THE SOUND
The English 2.0 mix (no subtitles) fights itself so much it's a wonder any of the dialogue actually gets through the jumbled mess. With a hip hop/techno reliant soundtrack covering almost every scene, plus multiple characters yelling at one another throughout, there's not a lot of opportunity for any kind of balance on the whole. The dialogue and soundtrack conflict with one another far too often, almost as if the sound designer threw all the elements at the wall to see what would stick. There's also an apparent issue with looping, or the post-production dialogue re-recording. In the first scene, Mendez's mouth movements don't sync up with the dialogue. This becomes a recurring problem through the production with various actors.

THE STUFF
Heist comes packed in a standard black keepcase with no insert. Fifteen chapter stops are accessible from the main menu. Otherwise where are no extras.