![]() ![]() A tip about the fortune sitting in safe deposit boxes in Hatton Garden leads him to assemble a unit of hardened, advanced cons (Broadbent, Courtenay and Ray Winstone), plus a young expert (Charlie Cox) in security systems, to pull off the biggest heist in England's history. After his wife dies, 77-year-old Brian Reader (Caine) tries to honor her wish to not get into any more trouble, but loneliness and inactivity don't suit him, so he starts looking around for a project. Reality proves to be a buzzkill.īoredom is still a key motivator here, however. ![]() Yet King of Thieves struggles to pin down the right tone: At times, it wants to be comic caper along the lines of The Lavender Hill Mob, but it can be only so adorable. And he has cast Caine and other aging British legends like Jim Broadbent and Tom Courtenay as the burglars, shrewdly recalling their screen pasts as working-class blokes with a harder edge than some of their more recent roles suggest. ![]() Movie Reviews 'The Old Man & The Gun': Redford's (Possible) Swan Song Makes For Easy Listeningĭirector James Marsh would seem to be the right man for the job, having turned the team efforts of crossing the twin towers via tightrope and caring for a domesticated chimpanzee into the superb documentaries Man on Wire and Project Nim, respectively. The four elderly men responsible for the burglary - which netted up to 200 million British pounds in cash, jewels and other valuables - are not your friendly shuffleboarders next door but experienced criminals who have no respect for the law, little respect for each other and no apparent feeling for the term "honor among thieves." In that sense, King of Thieves, inspired by the real-life 2015 burglary of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company in London, is unique. Though these films will occasionally have a sliver of melancholy, they're more inclined to look at their thieves as cute - to be admired for their ingenuity and feistiness rather than to be understood as criminals. (The latter was remade to lesser effect in 2017 with Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin in the lead roles.) But the tradition goes back as far as the 1951 Ealing Studios classic The Lavender Hill Mob, about a whimsical gold-smuggling scheme, and the 1979 George Burns-Art Carney-Lee Strasberg team-up Going in Style, about glum retirees and widowers looking to improve their diminished lifestyle. ![]() Just last year, Robert Redford evoked his Sundance Kid days by playing a genteel stickup artist in The Old Man & the Gun. There's a charming little subset of heist films about elderly men pulling off bank jobs, often out of boredom, and the authorities struggling to reconcile these crafty old geezers with the much younger hoodlums they might have expected. Footage from the cast's back catalogue is integrated amusingly.From left: Terry (Jim Broadbent), Billy (Ray Winstone) and Basil (Charlie Cox) display vaulting ambition in King of Thieves. Still, King of Thieves rattles along in diverting enough fashion. Caine, in particular, seems saddled with two discrete roles in the same baggy character. More damaging still is the tonal shift from Only Fools and Horses to The Long Good Friday. That’s funny too.īut the later sections, detailing the inevitable betrayals and fallings-out, feel culled from an entirely different movie. When the raid is discovered, they laugh at the media’s assumptions that only a foreign crew would now have this degree of know-how. Three cast members from Fred Schepisi's Last Orders – Ray, Michael and Tom – look to be working through a more light-hearted version of that story. The opening sequences feature much amusing griping about the modern world. ![]()
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