"Tower Heist" is the latest in a long line of heist movies, one that began life in 2006 when Eddie Murphy pitched it as an all-African American production with men planning to rob Trump Plaza. It was originally to star Murphy and other comedians such as Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, and Martin Lawrence. It seemed to be an African-American "Ocean's Eleven." However, the idea changed when director Brett Ratner came aboard and decided to make changes to eliminate the similarities with that earlier film.
Instead, "Tower Heist" is a movie that takes into account the recent financial crisis and shows a group of people fighting back against a Bernie Madoff-style character who left them all broke and, in some cases, homeless. Alongside those changes is the idea to make the cast more varied, bringing in Ben Stiller to join Eddie Murphy as one of the leads, along with an eclectic cast including Matthew Broderick and Casey Affleck.
With "Tower Heist" about to hit theaters, here is a look at other seminal heist movies.
"Heat"
Michael Mann redefined the heist movie with this blockbuster effort. Mann sold "Heat" to studios based on the fact that he paired up two of crime cinema's greatest stars in Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. However, the movie is great for much more than those two iconic actors.
Pacino is Vincent Hanna, a homicide detective who has made it his lifelong goal to bring down professional thief Neil McCauley, played by De Niro. The two begin a deadly game of chess as McCauley and his crew plan a robbery while Hanna and the LAPD try to catch them in the act. The movie also remains known for one of the most insane gunfights in movie history and a scene-chewing Val Kilmer as one of the thieves.
"Rififi"
The heist was always a major theme in classic film noir, and no movie in the genre emphasized it as well as "Rififi." Directed by Jules Dassin, a blacklisted filmmaker during the Red Scare witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, "Rififi" spends a full 28 minutes on the actual heist itself. Based on the novel by Auguste le Breton, Dassin makes some major changes to the script due to his dislike for much of the novel itself. Dassin made the film in France, following his exile from Hollywood, and chose to focus all his attention on the actual heist, a burglary of a jewelry store in Paris. The robbery features no music and no dialogue and remains one of the most intense sequences in cinema history.
"The Killing"
There are other better and more popular heist movies including "Ocean's Eleven" and "Inside Man," but I want to talk about a heist movie by one of cinema's most esteemed filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick. "The Killing" tells the story of a racetrack heist.
The movie opens with a criminal (Sterling Hayden) planning a racetrack robbery and then enlisting his team of thieves to work with him on this task. However, once the heist kicks in, that event takes up the final 35 minutes of the movie, representing non-stop action shot by one of the most brilliant filmmakers of his era. "The Killing" did not do well at the box office when it was released but has survived today as one of the heist genre's classic masterpieces.
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