KING OF THIEVES
Ageing disgracefully…
CERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR James Marsh STARRING Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Ray Winstone SCREENPLAY Joe Penhall DISTRIBUTOR Studiocanal RUNNING TIME 108 mins ★★★☆☆ OUT NOW
Carried out by pensioners, the 2015 Hatton Garden raid was the largest, most daring burglary in UK history. Director James Marsh made Man On Wire, one of the great true-life heist flicks. Stars Michael Caine, Ray Winstone and co are British crime-film lifers. So what could go wrong? Or to look at it another way, how could the result match up to its pedigree? Turns out, it can’t.
There are two ways to play such material: as a jaunty, how-the-hell-did-they-do-that? caper. Or as a sad, end-of-an-era elegy for men irretrievably past their best. Trouble is, after a perfunctory staging of the thieving,
Joe Penhall’s script hedges its bets. So half of the film is old-age gags (“It’s the blind leading the deaf,” jokes Winstone), and the rest is all grumpy recriminations as everything goes tits.
To up the emotional stakes, Marsh cuts in vintage footage of the cast in their younger days, but it’s too little, too late. The result is a film with lots of characters, but no character. “If you enjoy this fucking job you’re not doing it properly,” Caine warns an underwritten Charlie Cox. As a viewer, you can’t help feeling it’s the other way around…
THE VERDICT
Such a cast could never be boring, but this is a missed opportunity about men who couldn’t bear to miss theirs.