Sidney Lumet had a rare misfire with this heist movie starring Sean Connery in the days when he was trying to shed his Bond image. The film is well-directed from a technical standpoint, except for the horrendous sound design, which replaces a more traditional score with screechy electronic noises to drive home the world of (now badly dated) surveillance technology that the story takes place in.

The main problem is that the characters aren't defined enough to care about them. Their ultimate fates really don't matter. That makes the first half, which has them all meeting up and planning a big heist together, terribly tedious. The second half is better, but it's more the technical execution of the heist (and its subsequent undoing) that is of interest, not the arcs of any of the individual characters.