DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND (1966) - July 29, 2007
James Coburn was quite good as a charismatic thief/con-man who gets out of jail and immediately begins working on his next heist. And that's pretty much the only good thing about this otherwise dreadful film. The main problem here is that the film feels exceptionally disjointed; it's sort of episodic, with the Coburn character pulling off various cons to prepare for the heist. The only problem is that we never really find out what he's planning on doing, or how, or when. The film never really explains anything. One scene he'll be dating a woman so he can steal her keys to rob her (why -- I have no idea), then suddenly he'll be pretending to be an exterminator with absolutely no explanation as to what he's trying to do. Then finally they start to do the actual heist (the film doesn't bother developing the other three members of his little group at all -- at least I think there were three of them), but there's absolutely no excitement or tension because you have no idea what they're trying to do. Is it going well? Are they pulling off their plan? I don't know! Easily the worst heist movie I've ever seen. There goes my theory that you can't go wrong with a movie about a heist. *1/2
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