I’m a sucker for slow and meticulous planning and organization in film and games despite being messy and disorganized in real life. Like 80% of the appeal of Stalker and Tarkov to me is having to deal with the bullshit inventory system, some of the early Rainbow Six games seem interesting because you plan much of the siege beforehand, and XCOM where you have to improvise when the plan inevitably fails.
Some related shows that I’m fond of in no order:
- Early seasons of Breaking Bad
- Season 1 of Prison Break
- Money Heist (Spanish version)
- Better Call Saul (the scams and loopholes)
A Man Escaped
Le Trou (although I just learned about the horrible life of the screenwriter, so maybe not)
The Sting
Rififi is more about the unraveling (in an allegory about informants and the Hollywood blacklist), but the central heist is methodical, silent, and tense as hell - must have been an influence on those Mike-does-his-job scenes from Better Call Saul
I recently watched Gambit, which is unnecessarily Orientalist (why did they make Shirley Maclaine a Eurasian dancer from Hong Kong?), but it does have the best of both worlds, heist-wise:
spoiler
The first twenty minutes are Michael Caine’s fantasy of how the perfect heist will go, including the absolute silence and compliance of Shirley Maclaine’s character. The rest of the movie is how it actually plays out, and Maclaine’s character proves she’s actually a person and not a tool Caine can use.