![]() Also, Charlie Cox is thrown into the mix as Basil, a savvy electrician who helps facilitate the robbery. Seldom have I witnessed a more seasoned cast with so little enthusiasm. Elsewhere, Jim Broadbent plays the maniacal Terry Perkins Tom Courtenay is the one who keeps falling asleep Paul Whitehouse is dangerously under-used Michael Gambon is the ditzy fence and as is customary, Ray Winstone plays a thug. I’ve always admired Caine, particularly the way he can overpower a scene singlehandedly, but here he makes the fatal error of playing Brian as a one-dimensional curmudgeon. Michael Caine plays the ringleader, Brian Reader, who loses his wife at the start of the movie and vows, in her memory, to go straight. Here’s a thought – Diego Maradona still knows how to play soccer, but it doesn’t mean he should. Yes, I’m fully aware that these are criminals past their prime, that their tomfoolery is part of the movie’s charm and brand of comedy, that their mistakes can be attributed to absentmindedness. They’re either incredibly confident or downright daft. They convene, not in dingy abandoned basements or at empty docks, but at each other’s houses, the local pub, the public (!) pool house, just about every conspicuous location you can think of. They might as well have blasted the vault open with a tank. Why, then, do the men in King of Thieves, who’ve supposedly lived a lifetime of villainy, know none of this? They bumble through their heist, doze off while on lookout, pull up in flashy cars, bicker like amateurs, break tools, and otherwise go out of their way to be as noticeable as possible. I also know that you shouldn’t publicly discuss your crime in plain English. What I know of robbery I’ve learned from these movies, so I know how important it is to case a target, or how it is imperative to conceive of every possible contingency, to plan the act, think of a getaway and to generally succeed. It’s entertaining, isn’t it? To observe the various schemes and marvel at some of the truly ingenious ways humans trick other humans out of everything they value. Now, I’m not a trained burglar, so I usually relish heist movies for the way they open a window to an alien lifestyle of risk and excess. These are a bunch of grumpy, sour, crass, impenetrable old men, played by skilled actors who look as tired to be in the movie as the movie itself. What mischievous urges prompted them to resurface I’ll never know, not least because King of Thieves makes no attempt to clarify them, or indeed to shape its characters into anyone I’d want to care about. The perpetrators were, rather surprisingly, dudes in their 60s and 70s, who had all been professional thieves in the past and still lived comfortable everyday lives in the heart of the city. The movie is based on the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary in London, in which upwards of £20 million was stolen from a vault-full of safety deposit boxes. Usually that would be enough, but somehow, in some confounded way, none of it works. Now we have King of Thieves, a kinda heist comedy that believes it will succeed simply because it stars established veterans, is based on true events, and is very, very British. Occasionally, one will try to be more insightful than the others, like Paolo Sorrentino’s male-gazing Youth (2015). Or Going in Style (2017), about retirees planning to rob a bank after losing their pensions. It seems that studios believe there is an aching popular desire for movies about elderly geezers who try to defy their age by doing stupid things, like Last Vegas (2013), where a bunch of old fogeys tripped to Vegas and behaved like frat boys on spring break.
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