The "Why are you only talking about this now" in fiction.

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That's fine - a test readership is good to have. Did they all feel the same way?

A car is a thing that takes you from A to B and you're not talking about it, until it breaks.

If Hans and the other guy had discussed a CHANGE of plans in that scene in die hard, no one would have taken offense.
That's the trick - things have to go wrong or break, so characters have a legitimate reason to talk about the thing or plan.

The extreme example: that's why films about society tend to be dystopian or tragic.
It's easier to create a story that deals with the functioning of society when it is, at least in parts, broken, and needs fixing.

Can the plan go wrong for the gangsters, somehow? Maybe when we meet the victim and the gang, they make jokes about how the guy escaped, back then, and how in the future they might just as well use an innocent person as victim, because there won't be anything to report anyway.

Or the victim doesn't get his money from the gang, and he tells them they have to use a civilian next time, but then they'll get reported to the police - a risk they'd have to live with if they don't pay the people willing to play the vicytim for them

Oh okay, maybe that's the difference then in that mine, the plan doesn't go wrong. Well technically it does later, but the villain's still have to explain the original plan, so the reader undertands how they got there, in the first place, before things go wrong though. Perhaps I could show a flashback with voice over to explain the original plan, unless that is not the best method?

^That's an interesting writing situation, and slightly different from what I thought you were doing! When something doesn't go to plan, I think it's completely reasonable to have an earlier scene where the plan is explained. It's not redundant, as the events in the plan are different from the events that actually happen.

I've seen a variant of this where the plan is given in a series of brief, paragraph-length flashbacks intercut with the action. There's a rise in tension as the plan starts to go hideously wrong.

(I really like the questions you post, btw. You makes us think hard about how storytelling works!)

Oh okay, but what if I don't want an earlier to explain what the original plan was because an earlier scene, would give away too much before a surprise I want later? Should I just wait till after the surprise, and then show a flashback to explain the original plan?

You could use unmarked indirect speech and wrap the deacription of the plan and the surprise into one chapter that twists the whole story around

"It was supposee to be a simple operation: X was supposee to rob Y, who would then report back to the gang, rather than call the cops. But then X chickened out. [Etc. Etc]"

Who's telling this? Maybe one of the gangsters gets to tell it. It's a special chapter that will twist your story upside down, it might as well be told from a different perspective than the rest of the story