Outsmarting vilains

Rating: 2/10 (18 May 2018)

This is probably one of the most far-fetched movies and wasted casts of all time. It starts with a heavy heist, spectacular but right from the beginning, you can tell that this picture is going to out-smart itself, with cheesy soundtrack and ridiculous slow pace. The whole theme of the movie, is let's make these vilains so damn smart, let's show how intelligent they are and let's make sure the cops repeat it 15 times so that the viewer gets it....BORING !
Why would a team of gangsters hire somebody off the street they never worked with until the last moment ? And why wouldn't McCauley just gun down the other thief in the van and get rid of him, instead of trying to pay him his share TO THEN kill him in the middle of a parking lot ??? Where is the sense in that ! Why give him a meeting in a cafe, give him his money but then plan to kill him ? Oh my goodness this makes no sense at all. For a gang of pros they really know how to screw up like amateurs if this is going to be the theme. And then the cops, they start off as a team of tools, who can't get any information by their own department but need cons on parole or ex jail birds and check this out, Vincent schedules a meeting with Albert an informant who for some reason has his brother coming into town (why would Vincent agree to visit his brother anyway?) from Phoenix and he holds some really special information about the current case he's investigating. Wow, just like that, an outsider from Phoenix knows exactly the authors of a big heist by lucky fortune because he once met an ex-jail bird in custody, right in the middle of some street. Who wrote this script ? This is bad, this is far fetched, this is a draft, this is not a script. How can the police or the FBI not have a list of cons working in a perimeter instead of going through informants who's dialogues make no sense ! Man this is the way to make Police look absolutely useless.
So just like that by recognizing the word "slick", the LAPD then manages to identify several gang members without really revealing it to us, considering how appalling they are we have our doubts. But even with a team spying on them the gangsters still manage to outsmart the cops by spying on them as well !
But there are too many shortcuts in this movie, I don't understand how the Police suddenly gets the bank heist information at the last minute, gets there in time and then not just fire one gun shot but at least a thousand of them in the middle of the street (lucky pedestrians) from some narcotic agent who turned heel, makes no sense to me, and they still lose out on the two criminals. Never understood the diner scene and the confrontation, especially to talk about nothing and a cop trying to convince a criminal not to commit a crime like that makes sense. Why does the gang who seemed so determined to kill Waingro forget him for so long and how the hell does he get Trejo's adresse ?But the shooting is the most outrageous scene of all, there is no way that the police can risk flying bullets and crossfiring kill pedestrians in the middle of a gun-shooting -- just let the criminals go and sacked them in a turn or whatever but don't stand there stray fire impulsively, this is absolutely ill-advised. This scene is completely nuts. If you did not secure the perimeter before it is impossible to get into this kind of a shooting, this is cowboy stuff, not to mention the moment where Vincent shoots Cerrito holding a little girl hostage in the head.
And even after that scene, there's still a good 45 min, the movie is way too long, doesn't move fast enough, lingers too much on useless dialogues that get the story nowhere, the scene with the new-boyfriend watching the TV and the suicide girl I mean who cares when you're 2hrs30min in the movie just get it going ! The structuration of the script is completely wrong, these scenes do not add anything to the picture and especially not at the climax of the script !And the ending ends exactly like the whole movie is, far-fetched, a final chase where Pacino has legs of a 30 year old in the body of a 55 year old and shares a fraternal truce with McCauley, it's just not good at all. This whole theme of outsmarting vilains and making them look more glamor than they are is quite lame and uninteresting. Too bad, a lot of good actors, could have projected something so much better.