King of Thieves

I watched this movie at home on DVD from my local library. The cast features several of the best older British actors.

If you look up the 2015 Great Hatton Garden heist you will see that this movie pretty closely portrays what happened. The average age of the perpetrators was 69. The first half of the movie is for planning and carrying out the heist, over an Easter weekend. The second half is the surveillance that eventually identified them and allowed their capture.

Not a great movie but an interesting one, based on real people and real events.

A passable and down to earth presentation of the true story of the Hatton Garden Heist with a cast of big names, but little else. Although it shows the thieves as doddering old fools, it also shows them as bitter and greedy career criminals and as such, you can't really root for them, especially when they devolve into squabbling. There's a good sequence as it shows the effort put in to successfully carry out the robbery, but the whole thing lacks drama, and the police investigation in the second half has no personality to it.

The film is inspired from the true story of the Hatton Garden heist (thus, the script is already half-written) and the main actors are usually excellent. Despite this excellent a priori, the global result is bland, dull and devoid of passion. So boring that I was almost sleepy. As a synthesis: frustrating!

Yet another account of the 2015 Hatton Garden robbery that was pulled off by a bunch of geriatric career criminals, and which seems to hold a strange fascination for filmmakers and audiences alike. This one benefits from a stellar British cast (Caine, Winstone, Broadbent, Courteney, Gambon, Whitehouse) and its decision to focus on the disintegration of the gang's initial cameraderie almost as soon as the heist is underway rather than playing safe with unrealistic feel-good vibes. The real gang were unpleasant men, and to portray them as anything else would be a whitewash. Caine is finally showing his age (he's barely seen moving throughout) but still delivers, as do the rest of the veteran players.

No, there are no big car chases, or explosions. No fancy lasers, or big combat scenes. However, it is a fun story of aging burglars looking to score their final hurrah, portrayed by a slew of veteran actors who still have the skills to go from dottering elder to angry thug. Loved the use of the clips from their previous films as flashbacks. It was a refreshing change from CGI or Photoshop aging.