David Mamet has lost some his skill to surprise. The whipsmart dialogue is still there—tough, streetwise, hard for the actors to get their lips around but twice as satisfying for being so—but in “Heist” he puts about three too many extra loops in a circuitous plot that would have been fine without them. In “The Spanish Prisoner”, nearly every detail in the story is worked out with such precision that the final twist contains both eyeball-popping surprises and well-earned humor. The various pieces in the puzzle fit together splendidly and though it does require a leap of logic (Mamet pulls off the book switch with the cameras, not the characters), the secrets are delightful and revealed at exactly the right time (“Nobody looks at a Japanese tourist”).

With “Heist”, though, a few of the plot twists will have you marveling at the sleight of hand, while a few—the last few especially—will leave you completely unmoved. Take Rebecca Pigeon’s character. Her true loyalties keep you interested for most of the movie, and then grow completely muddied, to the point where you assume whatever she appears to be, she really isn’t. By then, you don’t really care anymore. Gene Hackman, playing his usual savvy salt-of-the earth hero who radiates avuncular integrity, is always well ahead of the game, and that’s the problem. What suspense is there when each new scrape he gets himself into is resolved by yet another example of how far-thinking he is? A more daring movie would have explored how this character would respond when all his preparations failed and left him with nothing but his wits to save him.

Several years ago I read an appraisal of “Fletch” in which the critic (whose name I cannot remember) noted that all of “Fletch”‘s suspense is flat because of the irony and cunning with which Chevy Chase imbues the character. The danger is nonexistent for the audience because it’s nonexistent with Fletch, since everything can be effortlessly done or undone with a clever deception or a cool quip. Same here with Hackman’s character. Every time Mamet puts him on the chopping block, you know he’s really not. In caper movies that thrive on plot twists, the audience must never be ahead of the plot. In “Heist”, although you’re never sure where the movie is headed, you know exactly who will prevail; the story suffers from the classic horror movie disease, where you know the baddie is only gone after suffering not one but multiple deaths. When the resilient creature arises in the background to assault the prematurely hugging heroes, not screams but yawns usually follow. So too with “Heist”.

For anyone who loves great movie dialogue, though, Mamet offers his usual banquet of zippy one-liners, and that’s well worth the price of admission. Danny DeVito is hilariously prolix without losing the required sleaze quotient. Delroy Lindo’s ex-con is a slightly more literate cousin of Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in “Pulp Fiction”; sometimes you’re just passing the time listening to the other characters, waiting for him to open his mouth again. And Ricky Jay’s spirited cleanup man is full of his own pulpy barbs that nicely reveal a lifetime of criminal expertise.

The one dud note, as usual, is Rebecca Pigeon. It’s not that she’s a bad actor, really, just that she isn’t terribly enthusiastic about selling any of the deception, either the made-up deception onscreen or the meta-deception of acting in a film. When she speaks, you don’t really get her character, you get Rebecca Pigeon reading the lines of a character Mamet (her husband) has written who has some important news to bear for the story. She’s the magician’s assistant, and not only has but shows off a distracting self-awareness that she’s the key to hooking the audience to make the trick succeed. That’s perfect for something like “The Spanish Prisoner”, but it’s way too much irony for a Gene Hackman movie. Ultimately you find yourself picking away the layers of drama and feasting on the language underneath. It’s filling enough.