Maybe it’s the obsessive-compulsive disorder in me, but I am a sucker for the heist film. The idea of a perfect plan gets me every time – the way it is conceived and executed, the attention to detail, the precision timing. Do they get the money, escape and live happily ever after? I’ve just got to check and be sure.

“Bandits” opens with a police standoff, as fugitives Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thornton) and Joe Blake (Bruce Willis) appear to be boxed in by the LAPD. I’m all revved up for blood and guts as I see swat teams in flak jackets and choppers flying overhead. But my two main characters aren’t playing along.

Why are they talking so damned much? These two bicker over a woman like two grade schoolers fighting over the last chocolate milk. I want stunts. I mean, this is a genre where there’re supposed to be lots of guns and violence and car chases and people setting gas stations ablaze. I come to the realization Oprah’s marketing team evidently came up with the ultimate way to make men and women actually enjoy the same movie. They grafted a chick flick onto a heist film.

We then flash back to where it all began: the big house. We find the two in the state pen where they are unlikely friends. The brains of the operation, Terry thinks too much, so much in fact that he is afraid of everything, a chronic hypochondriac with panaphobia. Joe is a chivalrous, pleasure -seeking id with anger-management problems. The dysfunctional odd couple springs from the joint, and devises a new and successful way to rob banks with minimum risk of getting caught.

As happens in any great friendship gone awry, a dame comes between the two. Kate Wheeler (Cate Blanchett) is a bored and mildly bipolar upper class housewife with a penchant for sappy Bonnie Tyler chick ballads. She runs away from her husband and runs into Terry with her brand-new Mercedes. With porcelain skin, doe eyes and fiery red locks, Kate looks part delicate beauty, part femme fatale. She quickly becomes romantically entwined with the complete opposite personalities of Terry and Joe.

Due credit must go to Harley Peyton’s script for adding the brilliantly simple gimmick to grand larceny schemes. The attention he’s paid to the group dynamics makes the film worth watching. Though it could border on the hackneyed, the dialogue gives the feel of a ’50s screwball comedy with a cast worthy of the lines.

Willis takes a detour from the more serious roles he’s courted since “The Sixth Sense” (say that five times fast). With his boyish charm and devilish grin, Willis plays Joe like a less cartoonish version of the David Addison character on “Moonlighting” that made his career.

Barry Levinson (1988 Academy Award winner for “Rain Man”) is one of Hollywood’s most versatile directors. Consistently, he makes successful and thought-provoking films, but is sandwiched somewhere between good and great directors. Though this is nowhere near nomination material, with the year the industry has been having it just might win Best Picture.