It’s a Great Time for Heist Movies Right Now

Light spoilers follow for The Weight and The Uprising; more substantial spoilers follow for The Rivals of Amziah King. 

It’s a bad time for the economy and our wallets, and a good time for movies that suggest, “Hey, maybe you should steal from your evil oppressors.” This summer has covered that idea from a variety of angles, thanks to a trio of uniformly entertaining movies. The Weight, The Rivals of Amziah King, and The Uprising are a historical drama, a neo-western musical, and a (clearly retconned) Robin Hood origin story, respectively; there isn’t much genre overlap between them. Instead, what unites them is the spirit of the heist — the sense that there is a carefully plotted plan, a cache of cash for the taking, and a fuck–The Man ideology. All three films also emphasize the physical toll of the urge to smash, snag, and steal. They immerse you within the exhaustion of poverty and servitude, and sweep you up in the exhilaration of maneuvering out of those circumstances. Catharsis is waiting.

Each of these films follows a clear-cut us-versus-them dynamic. In the Great Depression–era The Weight (opening this week in theaters), Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is a struggling WWI veteran and mechanic who, thanks to violent police officers certain this poor man is a criminal, is sent to a prison work camp in Oregon. The work camp is run by petty tyrant Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), who gets off on forcing the prisoners to call him “sir” and sets them up for failure by forcing them to move boulders without any blasting powder. As soon as Warden Clancy learns that Sam has a young daughter he’s desperate to get back to, it’s obvious that Clancy will find a way to put Sam in his debt.

A similar awful man looms large in the present-day The Rivals of Amziah King: Kurt Russell’s Dob McCoy, a shady agri-businessman who either threatens farms into using his products or crushes them into bankruptcy. Dob steals the beehives lovingly cultivated by musician and honey entrepreneur Amziah (Matthew McConaughey) and causes the man’s early death, ending up in the crosshairs of Amziah’s foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), who looks for revenge. And in The Uprising, basically every land-owning English person is an enemy of the peasants, who are overtaxed by King Richard II (Woody Norman) after the plague kills half of the country’s population. Men like the unnamed Ploughman (Andrew Garfield) have practically no power, but they do have numbers, and a growing anger that the rebellion-minded priest John Ball (Jamie Bell) encourages them to tap in to.

Of these three films, The Uprising is admittedly the least heist-explicit; Paul Greengrass’s shaky cam mostly follows marching mobs lambasting the king and furious revolts against soldiers and tax collectors. But what The Uprising has in common with The Weight and The Rivals of Amziah King, aside from bristling egalitarianism, is an interest in how rebellion is inherently a physical act, one that requires a person to use their body: what it can carry, what it can wield, what it can destroy, what it can create. The Uprising is about how a mass of bodies jostling for recognition can become a wave of change. The Weight and The Rivals of Amziah King individualize this idea by focusing on people’s bodies as integral parts of the thieving process and suggesting that a person pushing their physical limitations mirrors how they’ll push against social ones, too.

In The Weight, Warden Clancy offers Sam freedom from the work camp if he and three of his friends protect and transport an entire mine’s worth of gold, by foot, over more than 50 miles. As the four men struggle through the underbrush of Oregon’s thick forests, increasingly crumpling under the weight of their gold-bar-filled backpacks, The Weight tracks how the men learn that their employers aren’t quite honest about whether they plan to let the crew live. In one sequence, Sam stands in the middle of a rope bridge, catching a gold bar thrown at him from one side of a gorge, and then throwing it to the other side quickly enough that the weight of the gold doesn’t snap the precarious wooden planks. (Yes, it’s a Sorcerer homage.) Sam’s rising frustration and his panicky looks between both sides of the bridge are all the explanation we need for why he eventually decides to go along with the men’s plan to steal the gold for themselves. Soon they’re whispering when their two minders from the mine aren’t looking, have hastily figured out measures and math, and made a pact over a quickly dug grave for one of their party.

In The Rivals of Amziah King, a similar self-actualization occurs when Kateri and Amziah’s former employee Remick (Jake Horowitz, the star of filmmaker Andrew Patterson’s previous effort, The Vast of Night), track down Amziah’s stolen beehives in the middle of a desolate patch of woods. Working through an entire day and night, the pair construct an elaborate means of floating the heavy boxes down a river on a raft built from wooden pallets, steel drums, and propane tanks. Before then, they talk about their lives. Both Remick (a veteran still scarred by being forced to kill strangers, seemingly during the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq) and Kateri (an orphan whose farmworker mother “got caught up with some police” and killed herself in prison) were left behind by the systems they were supposed to trust, and both found a guardian in Amziah instead.

Kateri and Remick are emboldened by this heist, not just because it’s getting revenge for the crime that killed Amziah but because all the effort — screwing together the pallets, carrying all the beeboxes, guiding the raft through the chest-deep river’s swift current, bottling the honey the next morning — is something they first didn’t think they could do but ultimately achieve. An impossible thing became attainable because they worked together, through all the steps of a plan, to create a better reality for all the other misfits and outsiders Amziah brought together. There’s still another act of The Rivals of Amziah King to go; I won’t spoil the whole movie for you, because it’s one of the year’s best and you should see it. But suffice to say that the film’s ultimate effect — as is The Weight’s, and The Uprising’s — is one of highly energized epiphany, the feeling that maybe putting a team together and getting one over on the assholes undermining your selfhood and your worth and your labor is the only path forward.