Hollywood's Favorite Fantasy
Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist, Steven Soderbergh once said. Both require assembling a team of specialists, meticulous planning, and precise execution under pressure. But while the film industry has spent decades celebrating high-tech heists filled with laser grids, electromagnetic pulse generators, and biometric hacking, the reality of actual robberies tells a very different story. A deep dive into real-world heist data reveals that the most successful thieves are decidedly low-tech.
Anna Kornbluh, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has studied the cultural appeal of heist narratives. She argues that heist movies celebrate deep-dive nerdery and represent a form of anti-oligarch praxis, a fantasy of competent collectives outsmarting entrenched power. But the technology that makes these films thrilling is largely fictional.
What the Data Actually Shows
In 2014, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, a US nuclear weapons research facility, produced a 100-page report titled "The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World." The study compiled detailed information on 23 high-value robberies spanning 1972 to 2012. Their findings were clear: thieves dedicated enormous amounts of money and time to planning and practice runs, sometimes completing more than 100 rehearsals before the actual crime. But the methods themselves were remarkably primitive.
Real thieves tunneled through sewers for months. They donned police costumes to fool guards. They used brute force to bypass physical barriers. Nobody was deploying electromagnetic pulse generators to shut down electrical grids or using retinal scanners to breach vault doors. The main barrier to entry in most heists was, quite literally, a barrier to entry: a locked door, a wall, or a display case.
The Louvre Proves the Point
Recent evidence only reinforces the pattern. Last year, a heist at the Louvre cost the museum 88 million euros worth of antique jewelry. The most sophisticated technology involved was an angle grinder. Spanish researchers who analyzed art crimes from 1990 to 2022 confirmed that the least technical methods remain the most successful. Erin L. Thompson, an art historian at John Jay College of Justice who studies art crime, put it simply: high-tech technology does not work so well in practice.
Speed, not sophistication, is the common thread. Even elaborate heists requiring months of preparation ultimately come down to minutes of execution. The Louvre robbery, at its core, was a rapid smash-and-grab. An emphasis on speed does not mean heists lack skill, however. As the old saying goes, amateurs talk strategy while professionals study logistics.
The Engineer's Mindset Without the Gadgets
The cultural disconnect between heist fiction and heist reality reflects broader assumptions about technology. We tend to believe that sophisticated problems require sophisticated solutions. But the evidence suggests that human ingenuity, patience, and an obsessive attention to logistical detail remain far more effective than any gadget. Even without the gadgets, real heists and the movies they inspire share something fundamental: an engineer's mindset applied to an impossible-seeming challenge.
This article is based on reporting by MIT Technology Review. Read the original article.
