Heist of stupidity
STUDENTS’ DAFT ATTEMPT TO PILFER RARE BOOKS LOOKS DOOMED
Heist flick proves to be a gem
DO heist movies glamourise crime? In Ocean’s Eleven, we were always going to be on the side of the thieves.
After all, the robbery was audacious, the soundtrack was thumping and George Clooney had really nice hair.
Things are never really so clearcut. No crime is victimless and real-life Robin Hoods are as rare as flawless diamonds.
That’s an issue Brit director Bart Layton tackles head on in his engrossing and very tricksy movie about a real and astonishingly idiotic 2004 heist.
Here, Ocean’s Eleven is one of a clutch of films two bored students rent from Blockbuster while planning to knock off the rarebook collection at Kentucky’s Transylvania University.
In their heads, Spencer Reinhard (Dunkirk actor Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (X-Man Evan Peters) are Clooney and Brad Pitt.
And as we watch them as they prepare for the heist, the soundtrack and sharp editing seem to back them up.
But Layton begins to let the real world crash into his glossy fictional caper. As we watch them stake out the library, recruit two accomplices and hire old man disguises, he cuts to interviews with the real-life American idiots.
Older, wiser, and now ashamed of their deluded younger selves, they can’t even agree on the course of events.
At a key point, Reinhard admits he can’t be sure if something happened or is the product of his imagination.
What both men agree on is that it was Reinhard who noticed the slack security at his uni.
While guiding students around, librarian Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd) proudly shows him her star attractions – a first edition of Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species and a priceless copy of John James Audubon’s illustrated Birds Of America.
Out drinking with the unhinged Lipka, a failing student on a sports scholarship, he reveals how the librarian was the only person guarding the books.
The real Reinhard says he was just shooting the breeze, but the real Lipka remembers being invited in on a robbery.
The reasons behind their preposterous heist are a little murky. Neither of them is hard-up but both seem to have a dangerous sense of entitlement.
They talk about wanting to have an adventure, of being bored with life and disillusioned with the conventional, middleclass American life that was waiting for them.
As the plan grows increasingly elaborate they rope in maths whiz Eric Borsuk and rich jock Chas, before Lipka heads to Amsterdam to meet a fence played by Udo Kier. The librarian is the one detail that troubles them. In Hollywood romps, thieves don’t have to zap innocent old dears with Tasers. Layton gives the last word to the real Betty Jean Gooch. “They did not want to work to achieve a transformative experience,” she sighs, still visibly shaken by the attack. In this zippy, stylish and wildly original heist movie, crime fantasies have very real consequences.