It’s lock, stock and two limping old codgers
HEISTS are routinely romanticised by the movies, just as they are by public perception. Why this should be, I don’t really know.
The men who rob banks are no less hateful than muggers and swindlers of old ladies, yet still they get lionised in popular culture, as if theirs is a victimless crime, a mischievous two-fingers at society.
And here’s something else that always makes us smile: old people not acting their age.
The £200 million robbery two years ago in the heart of London’s diamond district, Hatton Garden, combined both those rib-ticklers.
Ronnie Thompson’s film duly takes the unoriginal view that we should look on the elderly lags who carried it out with affection — a perspective hardly diminished by a stalwart British cast including Larry Lamb and Phil Daniels, plus David Calder looking just like Captain Mainwaring and sounding just like Michael Caine.
The script is part Guy Ritchie, part Ealing comedy, making it Lock, Stock And Two Limping Codgers. Bizarrely, and unnecessarily, Joely Richardson plays a Hungarian moll. And Matthew Goode, cast very much against type as an East End villain, supplies the voiceover, as the young mastermind and the only robber who got away.
Gruff cliches, rhyming slang and glottal stops abound. One man is omniscient (‘There ain’t much that ’appens in London that he don’t know abaht’) and of course they don’t have a lookout guy, they have ‘eyes and ears on the outside’.
And yet, and yet, I can’t help feeling that The Hatton Garden Job might have the makings of a cult classic. It’s shamelessly derivative, unapologetically old-fashioned, defiantly corny, but it still tells a remarkable true story with a certain swagger and naive charm.