CAINE’S BUSPASS

At 85, the Italian Job star has another go at blowing the bl**dy doors off in a daring heist, this time with a posse of doddery geezers

Almost 50 years have passed since michael Caine led a band of virile young criminals over the Alps to turin in the Italian Job. Now here he is, at the other end of his career, leading a superannuated gang on another audacious heist, in what is effectively the octogenarian Job.

of course, it’s not Caine masterminding the robbery, but the elderly character he plays, Brian Reader, in the true story of the 2015 raid on the Hatton Garden safe Deposit Company.

Director James marsh doesn’t care too much about the distinction, however, so nor should we. He even gives us a fleeting but wonderful montage of shots of Caine and his co-stars, including tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent and michael Gambon, lifted from films they made back when they were sowing their wild oats, rather than eating them to keep themselves regular.

marsh’s one great asset, in presenting a story that has already inspired a couple of forgettable feature films, is his cast.

With Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse from the slightly less liver-spotted department, it is the cast pretty much all of us would have chosen if the job had been ours.

seeing them bouncing off each other as arthritic scoundrels made me sad that Bob Hoskins is no longer around to join them, as he would have done, had he still been alive, practically by royal decree.

the film begins with Reader, a career criminal, enjoying a nostalgic night out on the town with his dying wife (Francesca Annis).

But soon she is brown bread, as none of his old Cockney muckers have the insensitivity to say.

He assured her that he would spend his twilight years going straight, yet the promise barely even survives to the funeral.

there, instead of misty- eyed recollections of his fragrant missus, he is discussing the robberies that he and his pals never got round to carrying out.

With the encouragement of his nerdy, nervous protege Basil (Charlie Cox), he starts plotting a spectacular swansong. ‘things like this give me purpose,’ he says. We are expected, I think, to cheer him on. After all, he’s sir michael Caine.

this is the self-inflicted problem marsh has with his troupe of much-loved, venerable actors, and it’s one that he and screenwriter Joe Penhall acknowledge by reminding us half-heartedly, every now and then, that this crew of doddery villains are still actually meant to be pretty villainous.

Caine duly unveils that toothy snarl of his from time to time, but really, King of thieves belongs with all those other heist movies that manipulate us into rooting for the baddies, bestowing on them a kind of murky glamour. As so often, the crime-fighters aren’t nearly as interesting. Indeed, the cops here, not one of them represented by a national treasure, go about their business in near-silence.

there are a couple of other dramatic difficulties that the film, in trying to reflect accurately what happened (to the extent that much of the script follows actual police transcripts, taken from bugging devices planted after the robbery), does not entirely solve.

one is that Reader, the most compelling character played by the most famous actor, distances himself from the heist after a barney between himself and another robber, terry Perkins (Broadbent). Another is that breaking into the deposit-box vault takes place over an Easter weekend, dragging on for so long that in the middle of the job they actually pack up and go home for the night.

so there are no thrills in the style of ocean’s 8. Instead, this is