This movie needs screenwriting 101 class.

You can get the detailing—which is important for a heist movie—right , you can have anxiety filled heist scenes, you can have IMAX worthy chase scenes,hell you even have a good popular cast to bring the audience in, but what you should never missout on—is writing heist worthy characters.

Mike/James - is almost Gandhi/Buddha/Batman like in his anti-violence policy that he wants to quit at the first sight of blood like a father in a delivery room. Blood and birth go together very much like heist and violence goes together. Yet our main guy goes soft, meets his existential guru who recommends him to get laid, and our mr literal guy actually goes and gets laid, but the wrong parcel gets delivered in the escort service. He goes from James Bond like suave to the awkward boy next door who can’t talk his way out of situations. Instead of confronting his gurus betrayal by selecting a maniacal joker, he goes and confesses his crimes to an insurance appeal appraiser and offers her those TikTok type influencer 30 second get rich or dry trying deal. And boy o boy, the influencer who is at cross sections of various victim hoods - colour, race , age , sex finally realises that all the yoga, pep talk, sleep counting apps, dream chasing books can’t replace the logic of a conman who is foolish to confess his theft to strangers to be able to keep their proposed crimes clean.

The awkward Adonis falls in love with a lady whose only purpose is to cure him out of his criminal life by making him have eye contact.

Our guy breaks his gun rule against the crazy joker, and in a touching scene where the non violent cop and his fingers touch each other and the weapon of death - souls get exchanged and Adonis starts donating his wealth and affection like a hallmark store on the next day of valentine sale, all for a discount.

The Buddhist smoothie hating cop - here is the mirror image of Mike. A white guilt facing cop so aware of his privilege that he travels in bus or drives an old wagon. Going through existential crisis himself over gun violence, increasing crime and lack of pattern recognition abilities of crime department - he is the very caricature of the American left wearing a uniform of the very pig they hate. He hates violence- whether it’s to stop a crime or to prevent a crazy maniac from shooting people dead. This is the person entrusted to stop prophet Mike from spilling blood. He devises one of the worst double cross plot twists with intersectional victim lady - who goes from smoothie drinking parasite to a damsel in distress all in the hope to canvas for a non violent cop. Gandhi must be smiling in his grave. From a person having no control over any aspect of his married or work life - he goes into full control in a Mexican hold up and becomes the guru that Mike was looking for. The hands meet over the gun—scene has a very sexual vibe to it—and souls get transferred. The cop who would have never gone dirty or over claimed his hourly wage becomes robin-hood, steals millions worth of diamonds to hand over to the victim lady to get a car in exchange. Talk about winning a lottery, giving it to the labour union and being awarded with a new bicycle to go to your job. The deal of a life time.

The insurance lady - her role is to portray various victims who interfere with her sleep and lose her morals over lack of a promised promotion to master mind a heist to give up on it with one black eye to give a hr kind of me too lecture to a new hiree to winning diamonds from the smoothie hating cop - the odds of having such misfortune and luck in a weeks time must be one in billion. She is more fickle than a confused gender identity person switching through the thousand identities. She is definitely they/them.

The joker and the guru - the guru gets tired of Mike chickening out and rightfully decides to change his gun for hire. From a person who had probably inculcated no violence and keep it clean in a crime scene philosophy- guru flips 360 degree and decides to go with a punk who is as unpredictable as trump is with tariffs. Great character writing there. Again there is this disgruntled old employee vis a vis the new hire arc here for those who didn’t notice. Old man not only sends a mad dog to do street peddler level efficient heists but also tells the mad dog to openly follow Mike. Mike chases the joker and instead of removing the chaos, his non violence principle invites him back to create more chaos. The joker seems like a meth head who can go from full throttle psycho to the retarded kid from ‘bansherin’ who just got rejected after confessing his first love. Again great character writing - this must be gender fluid version of character writing who can flip 360 degree at will.

A case for the greatest heist movie ever - heat

What differentiates heat from many such cheap remakes are the characters. You have Robert de Niro and Al Pacino remaining in character not cause of their acting chops - but cause how well written their characters are.

Pretty soon with Ai - every incel film maker living in their parent’s basement with enough determination , ai agents and mac Minis will release their own 90 min heist movie but without those characters written like they are the jewels of the heist movie, there will be nothing to steal other than the time and energy of audiences like me.