Most heist films like to pretend they’re the real deal, but only The Italian Job lets us in on the true secret to a successfully staged robbery: Mini Coopers. Who knew that a tiny, boxy little wind up car was the key to thwarting the authorities and making off with a trunk full of gold bars? By sticking with his British car, Marky Mark (I’m sorry, Mark Wahlberg) is able to swerve through alleys and tight spots and generally create an elaborately long chase scene. Indeed, the Mini Cooper is the horse (or at least miniature pony) of the modern day stagecoach robbery. Of course there were a few other details to the plan. Something about controlling traffic lights and going out on a fake date with Edward Norton. But really, it was all a big Mini Cooper commercial. Criminals, buy sensibly. Gets great mileage too.

Although card counting isn’t technically a crime, it does fall into that category of scurrilous acts that will get you badly beaten up if you get caught. What 21 accomplishes is being a crime movie for nerds, who will find mathematical probability and statistical reliability to be exciting enough to replace car chases and gun fights. A group of MIT students, led by Kevin Spacey, embark on a scheme to win as much money as possible at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. They use their impressive IQs to count cards and use an elaborate system of signals and codes that sound impressive, but stand for things only math whizzes are sure to grasp. However, if you understand that kind of stuff, 21 could help you stick it to the man in Vegas. Or get punched in the face by Laurence Fishburne. Those are the potential outcomes.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective teaches you, besides how to pretend your butt is talking, the proper way to abduct various animals. It may seem like criminals worth their keep could nab a lapdog, but no one around could do it with quite the finesse of Ace. Just dress up as a UPS deliveryman and replace the pooch with a stuffed animal and cram the live one into your jumpsuit. Just don’t forget to have an ashtray full of dog food ready to go in the car. Of course, there are bigger fish to fry than a tiny dog. Ok, a dolphin isn’t a fish, but you’re gonna have to settle for that. Though we only discover the specifics of the plan as Ace uses his, uh, ace detective skills to solve it, the case of the kidnapped Snowflake teaches you exactly what kind of equipment you would need to steal an NFL team’s dolphin. Not to mention the mindset. Hint: it involves a disturbing obsession with Dan Marino and cross-dressing. Speaking of Dan, the movie even teaches you how to kidnap him as well. But why bother these days?

No, this movie never explains how Nicolas Cage convinced the world he was a good actor. That’s not a crime, just a mystery. The parts about how to break into Buckingham Palace and the White House aren’t even important. No, the real lessons come when the film teaches you how to go about kidnapping the President of the United States. It’s really quite simple. Just lure him into a tunnel under George Washington’s house with promises of adventure and discovery, (he will surely say yes), and instruct his Secret Service to sit out on the fun. I know what you’re thinking: “But I don’t have access to Mount Vernon! Let alone a secret underground railroad tunnel that doesn’t actually exist!” Well, just improvise. D.C. has a sewer system, doesn’t it? Just throw a pretzel or something down there for him to follow. You already have the advantage of an incredibly stupid President.

Before The Dark Knight made dressing up as a clown to commit bank robberies cool, Bill Murray was ahead of the curve in Quick Change. He commits a brilliant bank robbery by dressing up as a clown and then shedding the costume and face paint to make his getaway with the rest of the hostages. Despite the simple genius of the plan, there is a hitch you should avoid if you ever decide to use it for yourself: getting out of there, fast. Bill and his crew face ever-increasing obstacles on their quest to make it to the airport with their money. Just look in the yellow pages for a reliable cab company if you’re gonna go for it.

Alfred Hitchcock's most experimental film, which was famously filmed in ten minute long shots on a single set with little editing, also teaches you how to commit the grimmest crime of all: the perfect murder. Spurred on by the “Übermensch” and the art of murder, two students decide to murder a classmate in order to exert their superiority over him. Of course, they don’t stop there. They stuff his body in a trunk and serve food on top of it during a dinner party. And it gets better! The guests show up, and are the poor murdered kid’s closest friends and family! And people think college kids do crazy stuff these days. Unfortunately, they get so excited about their little prank that they gain the suspicion of the guests, and the cops show up to ruin the fun. Lesson learned? If you have a dead body in a trunk, and you're serving onion dip on top of it, please try to keep your cool.

If you want to knock off a Vegas casino for big bucks, Danny Ocean is your man with a plan. But if you can’t get him to organize it, just watching Ocean's Eleven gives you a sense of what kind of crew you need to pull it off. You need tech guys, a pickpocket, an elderly distraction and even an acrobat if you want to break into a vault under three of Vegas’s biggest casinos. By posing as card dealers, high rollers and S.W.A.T. team members, they pull off the heist, and George Clooney even manages to win his ex-wife back. It should be noted that following the plan in this movie does not guarantee that kind of result. I mean — he’s George Clooney. However, it is still a much better plan than the one in Ocean’s Twelve, which shows you how to steal ten dollars from an audience member and involves Julia Roberts playing a character impersonating Julia Roberts. My head hurts.

Fight Club doesn’t teach you how to commit a standard crime like robbing a jewelry store or cutting that tag off a mattress. Instead, it teaches you how to form a violent underground organization that exists for no reason other than to hit people and commit anarchist acts against society. Once you get a bunch of aggressive guys together that are willing to do anything in the name of messing up the world, all you really have to do is set up a bunch of explosives in the buildings of credit card companies and boom, you’ve got financial chaos and a clean slate for all those with long bills to pay off. It should be mentioned that having a split personality can be extremely helpful. Oh, and Fight Club also teaches you how to make soap out of the fat thrown out of a plastic surgery office. That’s useful, right?

The Inside Man opens with a monologue by Clive Owen about how he has planned the “perfect” bank heist. For you budding criminals, this is a signal to take out that pen and paper and take notes. He begins by forcing the hostages to dress up exactly like the robbers themselves so that the police will be woefully ignorant as to who is who and whether to shoot at the jumpsuit clad individuals. The thieves then stage a fake execution just to make it seem like they mean business. Owen even goes as far as playing audio of a dead Albanian President next to a police transmitter to convince them he’s foreign. When Albanian politicians are brought into the plan, you know it’s good. The only flaw is his final action: sitting in a hole under the bank for a week waiting for the coast to clear. It’s a fantastic plan if you can sit for a long time without a bathroom break — otherwise it could get messy. And was all this effort for mere cash? No, not at all. They were after … Nazi diamonds! It made sense in the film, I swear.

Anyone that has worked in a dead-end, miserable, lifeless work environment has probably dreamt of the opportunity to rob their company of a ton of cash and then make a clean getaway to some island in the Pacific. Or at least to sit at home in their underwear and watch Kung Fu movies all day. Peter Gibbons gets just that opportunity when his computer programmer friends at Initech hatch a brilliant scheme to steal fractions of a cent from their company over a long period of time to build up a mass of cash that the company will never notice is missing. Moral? Maybe not, but it’s a better retirement plan than the “Jump to Conclusions Mat.” The real lesson to learn from the film is to always pay attention to decimal points. Moving them over a digit can cause a simple crime to go horribly wrong. Also — try to work with someone unstable enough to burn the building down, and thus remove the evidence. Who knew mental instability could prove so useful?