The Heist

From the people behind the meta Gunslinger, this short film sets up an Ocean's Eleven clone to start making fun of the heist clichés, before jumping into more general movie tropes and clichés.

It is a simple idea and essentially it is one joke repeating in different ways. It works very well though as it is slick, very well paced, and of course consistently funny. The scenes will be recognizable to most people general but also in the specifics (such as the Elliot Gould character, or the dig at Don Cheadle's mockney accent). It is only 4 minutes long, which is the perfect length and it uses its time well; as it moves into general clichés it had the potential to become worn thin, but then it circles back round to a very nice internal twist on the joke with the final scene, and cut to credits. Like a perfect heist, it gets in, does the job, gets away clean.

Two handsome criminals talk about an Ocean's 11 style heist to a rich financier. The team members they propose get more and more outlandish.

This is actually a very funny satire of the film industry. They spin a story so full of movie tropes that it eventually goes total meta by the end of the story. It definitely had me smiling and laughing most of the time, and at 4 minutes, that's probably very easy to fit into any festival program. It feels a lot longer than 4 minutes. It may not be the best thing I've ever screened, but I can't give it anything less than my highest recommendation.