[In the following excerpt, Wrathall comments on what he considers Mamet's directorial shortcomings, specifically in Heist.]

Boston, the present. Joe Moore and his gang—girlfriend Fran, Bobby Blane and Don Pincus—carry out a brilliant jewel heist [in Heist]. But Moore's face is caught on surveillance camera. He decides to retire. His fence Bergman, however, refuses to give him his cut unless he carries out “the Swiss job,” which Bergman has already invested money in setting up.

Needing money to fund his retirement, Moore reluctantly agrees to Bergman's terms, which include Bergman's nephew Jimmy Silk coming along on the job to ensure Moore doesn't run off with the proceeds. Moore tries to bluff Silk into believing the job is too risky, but Silk proves hard to get rid of because he is attracted to Fran. To keep tabs on Bergman, Moore gets Fran to play along with Silk.

Moore and gang carry out “the Swiss job,” which involves stopping a plane on the runway and stealing gold bullion from the hold while pretending to search for a bomb. Afterwards, Silk knocks Moore over the head, and leaves with Fran and a van full of gold. But the gold in the van turns out to be pig iron. The real gold is still on the plane, hidden in containers registered to Moore, which he later collects from the airport. Furious that he has been double-crossed, Bergman kidnaps Pincus, who reveals before he is killed that Moore has concealed the gold in the railings of his yacht. Arriving at a dock to pick up Fran, Moore is surprised by Bergman. Silk drags Fran away. In the ensuing shoot-out, Moore and Blane kill Bergman and his men. Moore and Fran are reunited, but Fran announces she is leaving him for Silk. Silk pulls a gun and they take the gold. Moore heads off into retirement. It turns out he still has some gold concealed as iron bars in his truck.

Ageing crooks planning a robbery find their plans jeopardised by an inexperienced young hothead who insists on coming in on the job. The basic set-up of David Mamet's new film Heist has much in common with that of American Buffalo, the play that made his reputation over a quarter of a century ago. But while Teach and Donny in American Buffalo were at the very bottom of the criminal food chain—they couldn't even get it together to steal a nickel—Joe Moore and his gang, including girlfriend Fran and the far younger Jimmy Silk (there at the behest of Moore's fence Bergman), are at the very top, and the chief pleasures of Heist lie in the two meticulous robberies they carry out.

In the second scene of the film, when a waitress turns away to squirt some drops in her eye, the eagle-eyed viewer may notice that no liquid actually leaves the dropper. This tiny detail, which might have been a mere continuity error in a less tight movie, turns out moments later to be crucial: the eye drops are in fact poison which she slips into the coffees for the staff of a nearby jeweller's. And so the heist begins … A later scene—a quintessential Mamet set piece in which Gene Hackman's Moore bluffs a traffic cop into letting him go—hangs on a tiny adjustment to a wing mirror, which alerts the cop to the fact that Moore's companions in the car are getting edgy. In an age of mindless spectacle, Mamet demonstrates, a thriller can be all the more thrilling for hinging on such minute actions.

Asked how he manages to be so smart, Moore replies: “I try to imagine a fellow smarter than myself, and think, ‘what would he do?’” It's tempting to imagine Mamet using the same modus operandi in dreaming up his ingenious scams. But as Moore and his gang are all too aware, a clever plan doesn't always prove perfect in the execution. The first heist nearly misfires when one of the jeweller's staff fails to drink her drugged coffee; in the second—a characteristically neat touch—it's also a cup of coffee that allows Moore to smuggle a gun into an airport when his first ruse falls through. Heist is packed with memorable aphorisms (“You know why the chicken crossed the road? Because the road crossed the chicken”); the performances (not least from Hackman) are note perfect; the camerawork, courtesy of Boogie Nights DoP [director of photography] Robert Elswit, more dynamic than one has come to expect from Mamet. And yet overall the execution leaves something to be desired.

The opening shot of the film is a close-up of a shotgun, and to paraphrase Chekhov (whom Mamet has adapted and directed on the stage), if you show a shotgun in Act I, you've got to use it in Act 3. Unfortunately Heist's shoot-out, when it finally arrives, is like something out of a bad TV series from the 80s, with Danny DeVito's Bergman and his goons popping out from behind barrels on a deserted dock, to be shot down at leisure by the outnumbered Moore and his fellow gang member Blane. Some aspects of film-making clearly hold no interest for Mamet. He has written (in his 1996 collection of essays Make Believe Town) of his contempt for such movie staples as backstory and the sex scene. Fair enough, they can be clichéd devices in the wrong hands. But without recourse to either, the central male-female relationships in Heist are left seeming very hollow. The multiple plot twists of the last act all depend on whether Fran has really left Moore for Silk, or is just pretending, but the trouble is we just don't care (and this despite an unrecognisably ballsy performance from Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon, spurning her grating bluestocking image from State and Main and The Winslow Boy in favour of spiky bleached hair, ripped denim and tattoos).

The air of studied, stagey unreality that clings to all of Mamet's self-directed films seems more jarring than ever in a heist movie, and leaves you wishing he'd given the script to someone else. For a taste of a Swiss-watch Mamet thriller put across without his directorial mannerisms, check out Lee Tamahori's underrated The Edge. Or better still, imagine Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Ricky Jay and Sam Rockwell on stage at the Donmar Warehouse.