In a Nutshell
An old-school Heist movie about the about the Hatton Garden heist in London by a group of old-school thieves back in 2015.
[imdb]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5789976//[/imdb]
Review
James Marsh’s King of Thieves takes an impressive ensemble cast and serves up a below-par heist movie that’s inspired by the burglary of the Hatton Garden hesit in London by a group of elderly thieves back in 2015.
All the tropes and clichés you’d expect are present and accounted for here within the feature; but that sense of overfamiliarity isn’t this film’s biggest problem, it’s the simple fact that this group of elderly criminals are such an unlikeable bunch of bastards that it’s hard to root for any of them.
These aren’t Robin Hood-esque criminals with a heart of gold; no they’re opportunistic thieves who’re merely out to fill their own pockets. The screenplay never attempts to explore anything that might even resemble a motive for their decision to pull off the heist.
Little if any Character Development at all
Instead, we’re pretty much thrown straight into proceedings with Charlie Cox’s Basil presenting the idea of the robbery to Michael Caine’s character (Brian Reader), just days after the funeral of his recently deceased wife. Despite promising her he’d go straight Brian pretty much jumps at the chance for one last big score and in true Danny Ocean style is quickly assembling his crew for the heists of heists.
The thing is there’s little or any backstory given to any of the film’s central characters, so they’re left as nothing more than clichéd caricatures of characters we’ve seen in other films before.
We’ve Michael Caine doing his usual shtick, with a bit extra of ‘effing and jeffing’ thrown into the mix, Ray Winstone does the ‘geeza gangster’ thing he’s done many times before in better films than this and we’ve even Michael Gambon ditzing it up big-time as the group’s unreliable fence Billy ‘The Fish’ Lincoln.
Loveable Broadbent gets Nasty
The only person who manages to really stand out amongst the crowd is Jim Broadbent. Much like Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, the ever-loveable actor oozes genuine menace as the unhinged Terry Perkins, a man determined to use this heist as an opportunity to take the ‘King of Thieves’ title away from Caine’s character.
Other than the weak character development this film’s other big problem is the tone, it simply can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. The attempt at humour feels half-hearted and laboured, with repeated gags about our group of elderly cons being hard of hearing, falling asleep when they shouldn’t and frequently needing to pee.
Honestly, it’s not that funny in the first place, but the writers persist with this ‘geriatric humour’ at nauseam and it quickly becomes pretty annoying. It feels like they’ve tried to soften the film’s edges by selling it as a comedy in the hope of broadening its appeal at the box-office, but this film needed to be edgier, dare I say it, but it needed someone like Guy Ritchie at the helm: a filmmaker who’d know what to do with this type of film.
Not Funny Enough, Nor Gripping Enough!
When you sell your film as a ‘comedy heist’, the jokes need to be much sharper than what they are, then as the film starts to take a darker turn near its finale as the distrust amongst the group begin to escalate, it just doesn’t know what to do and we’re left with a film that feels like a muddled tonal mess.
It’s a shame because the film has a such a strong cast and I’m a fan of the director James Marsh, but ultimately this is a heist movie that doesn’t really know what it wants to be or what to do with the characters themselves. It’s not really that funny, nor is it that gripping because when you don’t really care for any of these crooks, why would you give a damn when they eventually get caught by the fuzz?
Verdict
There’s nothing here that’ll blow your bloody doors off!
