Heist Movies to Watch If Apple TV’s Mackie and Dornan Series Has You Hooked
Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan lead ’12 12 12′, an eight episode heist drama that debuts on Apple TV with two episodes, followed by weekly releases through December 25. Each episode moves across three timelines tied to one elaborate heist, covering the months of planning, the hours of the job and the days of fallout.
Mackie plays a disgraced FBI agent squaring off against Dornan’s career criminal, with a bank vault beneath the streets of Zurich as the endgame. Anyone searching for movies like ’12 12 12′ has a deep genre to explore, since heist films span many different genres. These ten picks cover gentleman thieves, rural bank robbers and a few comedies along the way.
‘Ocean’s Eleven’
Steven Soderbergh’s film follows a crew assembled to rob the vault of a Las Vegas casino, with George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon among its cast. It is often treated as the quintessential entry in the genre, helped by stylish direction and a final reveal that explains how the job was pulled off. Its focus on a crew cracking a vault sits close to the Zurich setup in ’12 12 12′.
‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’
Joseph Sargent’s film follows criminals who take a subway car hostage in New York City, while a group of men tries to work out how they plan to escape with the ransom. Walter Matthau plays an everyday protagonist who feels like exactly the kind of New Yorker who would be pulled into such a situation. It offers a grittier counterpart to the more polished capers on this list.
‘Thief’
Michael Mann’s film centers on a highly skilled jewelry thief who wants to go legitimate and takes one final job to earn his freedom. James Caan leads the cast, and Mann’s stylish direction is credited with defining an entire genre of crime movies. A thief weighing one last score echoes the career criminal at the center of ’12 12 12′.
‘Logan Lucky’
Steven Soderbergh adapts the heist formula to a new setting here, as two brothers work together to rob a NASCAR race in North Carolina. Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, Adam Driver and Daniel Craig headline a film that blends sharp writing with humor. It suits viewers who want the planning and execution of a job with a lighter touch.
‘The Killing’
Stanley Kubrick’s early thriller follows a criminal who gathers a group to rob a racetrack. The plan is carefully laid out, but things go awry when one of the men tells his wife, who begins hatching a scheme of her own. It runs under ninety minutes and holds back the way its pieces fit together until the very end.
‘Hell or High Water’
Taylor Sheridan’s take on the genre follows two brothers in rural Texas who rob banks to pay off their family home. The heists are small in scale, and the film leans on the relationships between the brothers and the two cops nearing retirement who chase them. That pursuit between lawmen and robbers mirrors the rivalry Mackie and Dornan carry across Europe in ’12 12 12′.
‘A Fish Called Wanda’
This comedy follows a con artist named Wanda, who tries to set her partners against each other in a diamond heist after the job is finished. Jamie Lee Curtis, John Cleese and Kevin Kline star as confusion and misunderstandings keep piling up until everything collapses. Its attention to what happens after the score is a loose cousin to the days of fallout that ’12 12 12′ builds into every episode.
‘Reservoir Dogs’
Almost all of the on camera action in Quentin Tarantino’s film takes place after the heist has ended and gone horribly wrong. The drama comes from learning who survived the job and how those survivors relate to one another, with Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen in the cast. It makes a useful companion piece for a series that also treats the aftermath as part of the story.
‘The Thomas Crown Affair’
Pierce Brosnan stars as a gentleman thief who steals paintings for pleasure, and he becomes attracted to the insurance investigator looking into one of the thefts. Part of the appeal is that neither of them is sure the other can be trusted, and the final heist at the Met in New York City is a highlight of John McTiernan’s direction. That wary pairing of thief and investigator is a natural fit for viewers who enjoy the hunter and hunted dynamic in ’12 12 12′.
‘Inception’
Christopher Nolan’s film is not usually thought of as a heist movie first, yet it tells the story of thieves who enter a person’s dreams to steal or implant an idea. It plays out like multiple elaborate heist sequences stacked on top of one another, and the team must improvise when the plan stops going their way. Since ’12 12 12′ layers its own planning, execution and aftermath, which of these films would sit comfortably beside the Zurich vault job, and where would you place it among the rest?
