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6. Ocean’s 11
Take 11 people, each one an expert in something that can be used in a robbery , stir (or shake) well, add a good plan and you get 150 million, right? But what good is that when you piss off a casino boss that will hunt you down to the end of the world? Sure, you can fix all of that in the sequel, but you still have to go through the motion. Plus, considering all the nights spent on figuring out whom to cast as the 12th in the sequel, 150 million doesn’t sound that great anymore.
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5. Die Hard 1 and 3
You may be smart, have a great accent and come up with an awesome plan to steal a lot of cash, but once you get Bruce Willis into the mix, you’re doomed to fail. Hans Gruber certainly came tumbling down, well, falling down more like it. And his brother didn’t learn a thing from it. He came up with an even more elaborate plot to get revenge and steal gold. And he almost gets away with it, until his chopper gets in those powerlines. Ouch!!!
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4. Reservoir Dogs
What not to do when planning a robbery: hire an undercover cop, hire a psychopath, hire anyone that’s remotely unscrupulous. Reservoir Dogs fails at each of these, with Tim Roth at the center of a bloodbath. Kudos to Harvey Keitel’s character, that, when facing a shot comrade and claims that the person who shot him is a cop, tries to protect the cop by making sure none but Steve Buscemi is left unharmed. Any robbery that ends with Mr. Pink getting away with the diamonds is a failed robbery.
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3. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
I don’t think I have to point out what goes wrong in this one since you have two brothers, a junkie and a deadbeat, one of which is having an affair with the other one’s wife, who decide to rob their parents’ jewelry store. Things that go wrong: the third wheel shoots their mom and gets shot himself, his wife and her brother blackmail the two, a drug dealer gets shot and robbed, one of the brothers gets shot, then his father, figuring it all out, kills him by suffocation in the hospital.
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2. Heat
So you’re Robert De Niro, you’ve committed several successful robberies, even managed to shoot it out with the police on the street and survive. Now you’re almost ready to leave it all behind and spend the rest of your life with the woman you love (like ?). Not exactly. Enter Al Pacino, the cop. There’s really no pride in being in a one-on-one shooting with Pacino and losing, especially if you’re De Niro and have managed to elude dozens of policemen not an hour ago, all while running through downtown wielding a AK-47.
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1. Dog Day Afternoon
This time it’s Al Pacino who fails at robbing a bank, while in the process giving up his partner. If there’s one thing you learn from this movie is that you never ask for a plane in a hostage situation. That’s a code for the cops to take you out. Final tally: 1 dead, and one in prison for 20 years, none of them went down in a blaze of glory. Now that’s a failed robbery.
Posted on April 20th, 2009 by MrWiseguy
Filed under: Movies
Like Dog Day Afternoon personally speaking.