Sometimes, it’s the heist that’s easy, and the getaway that’s the big obstacle. That’s been the premise of many heist parodies, from The Lavender Hill Mob to A Fish Called Wanda. One of the funniest of this vein is Quick Change, the only movie Bill Murray has ever directed (he shared the chair with Howard Franklin). Murray also stars as a brilliant and bitter city planner who stages a bank robbery that’s practically a piece of performance art (he’s dressed as a clown throughout).
But while Murray and his accomplices (Geena Davis and Randy Quaid) pull off the robbery without a hitch, getting out of New York City proves a seemingly insurmountable task. Sure, the movie is full of nightmare scenarios that haven’t aged well (in our era of GPS and cellphone map apps, the movie wouldn’t make sense), but as Tony Shalhoub proves in his performance as a panicky cabbie who speaks an indecipherable dialect (a part that he elevates well above the lazy stereotype that it could have been), when it comes to heist films, it’s all in the execution.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0PvMpHHwjY]