Unlucky 13

Rating: 4/10 (29 December 2019)

There was a time, when American was black and white, when any toothless dropout with a gun could hold up a bank or a payroll by rolling the fat, sleepy security guard, then get into a fatal shootout with cops. And then get memorialized in a mediocre B-movie.
Then along comes Bonnie & Clyde and those two losers get the full glam treatment. Fair enough, that was a great movie. But Hollywood should have quit while it was on top.
Fast-forward 50+/- years and we've got a tired genre. Maybe you can still walk into a bank in Bumblefk, Iowa, and steal some cash from the tellers. But who wants to watch a movie about that? No, heist movies have to be big-time, big-screen action movies. So they're either stealing state secrets or holding up casinos or what-have-you. Except nobody, in real life, is brute-forcing their way into modern bank vaults or Vegas casinos. Too many cameras. Too much security. Too many armed guards.
The modern heist movie is Wall Street rigging energy distribution in California, with a company named Enron as a fig leaf, and nobody getting shot, one guy going to jail, and then getting suicided shortly thereafter. That's the modern reality of heists.
Movies like Ocean 13 are just cartoon junk. Well-dressed sugary treats that are mere color revivals of black&white B-movie plots that weren't that compelling in the first place.
Stop making action/heist movies, already. They are dead.