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.

For those who say this movie is slow and low budget: what did you expect? This is not Transformers, there is no Mark Wahlberg or Bruce Willis from the 90's, no CGI, no John Woo feat. Michael Bay. This is just a well delivered true story, brought to you by many of the best actors of our time. And it does not want to be more, so why do you?

The wealth of acting talent and experience prompted me to want to see this, coupled with an interest in the real life story.

I'm stunned to read people find this slow, it's hardly designed as an action packed thriller. It's the telling of real life events. I thoroughly enjoyed it, the story is intriguing, the acting is first rate, plus it contains some very humorous moments.

It begins off in quite a light hearted way, it's jolly and funny, but oncr the deed is done, it takes on a more serious tone, the laughs are fewer, and the true greed of the characters comes out.

Excellent performances, Caine, Gambon, Courtenay and Winstone all excellent, but for me it was Jim Broadbent who stole the show, he was superb. Francesca Annis was lovely in it, though sadly not for very long.

It's not a classic, but well worth seeing for the wealth of acting talent. 8/10

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.

This film very much feels like a metaphor for the actors themselves, one last go at making some money and it all going wrong.

The film didn't know what it wanted to be, a gritty crime drama or last of the summer wine.

No back story on the gang at all apart from 10 seconds of old footage. We're rushed into the heist scene and before you know it it's all done and dusted. That leaves time for endless squabbling of characters you don't really know anything about.

A strange casting with Michael Gambon, arguably the best actor there - cast as a bumbling idiot. Jim Broadbent playing the nasty hard man, which just doesn't suit him given the film's we're all used to seeing him in.

Ray Winston was good and played well throughout the film, but again a very tenuous relationship to the gang and zero back story makes it hard to get involved with the characters.

The production quality for me was also let down, had the feel of a low budget tv drama, though I suspect this is because they clearly blew the budget on the cast.

I'd save this one for a long haul flight or when it's free on Amazon.