Maybe, ten or so years younger than The Great British Train Robbers, Brian Reader at 76 with his four man crew of old lags and a so-called security alarm expert, pulled off an audacious Easter Bank Holiday robbery that gripped the nation, and the wider world. Surely, in 2015 a new breed of lithe, cunning and internet ready thieves, tunnelled their way into Hatton Garden’s safety deposit box vault and pinched jewellery, cash and gold to the tune of an estimated £300 million pounds…? The Hatton Garden heist is the biggest robbery in British history since Bruce Reynolds slipped into a train conductor’s uniform and ransacked £2.6 million pounds (that’s £50 million quid in today’s money) from a Royal Mail train back in 1963. I’d love to see BAFTA nominations for them both in Acting/Supporting Acting categories.Sir Michael Caine and an all-star cast of British wrinklies bicker and creak their way through the audacious Hatton Garden heist that shuffles into an lacklustre crime caper.
A head-to-head unblinking confrontation between Broadbent and Caine is a high-point in the whole film… just electrifying. but here he is borderline psycho and displays blistering form.
King of thieves movie review full#
While he has played borderline darker roles (“ The Lady in the Van” for example), he rarely goes full “Sexy Beast” evil….
King of thieves movie review series#
But it is Broadbent that really impresses: he generally appears in films as a genial but slightly ditzy old gent in films like the “Potter” series “ Paddington” and “ Bridget Jones“.
Caine is just MAGNIFICENT, at the age of 85 with the same screen presence he had (as featured) stepping out of that prison in “The Italian Job” Winstone is as good as ever in playing a menacing thug, and even gets to do a Michael Caine impression! Gambon is hilarious as the weak-bladdered “Billy the Fish”. It’s all delivered to a deafeningly intrusive – but in a good way – jazz-style soundtrack by the continually up-and-coming Benjamin Wallfisch.Īs in the recent “The Children Act”, it is the acting of the senior leads that makes the film fly for me. Caine finally gets his hands on that elusive gold 48 years later! (Source: StudioCanal). “Hang on a minute lads… I’ve got a great idea”. “King of Thieves” nicely follows this well trodden story-arc, but – for me – does it with significantly greater style than the norm. (Pretty much as you would assume happens most of the time in real life!) Kermode points out that such movies play with our emotion in secretly wishing the bad ‘uns to succeed in doing something we would never have the bottle to ‘step out of line’ to do. The gang is led by the “king of thieves” – Brian ( Michael Caine) – highly regarded as an ‘elder statesman’ among the London criminal scene.ĭid you see Mark Kermode‘s excellent “Secrets of Cinema” series on the BBC? (If not, seek it out on a catch-up service!) The first of the series deconstructs the “Heist” movie, showing how such movies track the preparation, the execution and the progressive unravelling of the wicked scheme, typically through internal strife among the gang itself. The film tells the ridiculous true story of the “over the hill gang” – the bunch of largely pensioner-age criminals who successfully extracted what was definitely £14 million – and could have been up to £200 million – of goodies from a vault in London’s Hatton Gardens jewellery district over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend in 2015. From left, Tom Courtenay Jim Broadbent Michael Caine Paul Whitehouse and Ray Winstone. Looking pretty happy… given the circumstances.
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