![]() ![]() Footage from the cast's back catalogue is integrated amusingly. Still, King of Thieves rattles along in diverting enough fashion. Caine, in particular, seems saddled with two discrete roles in the same baggy character. More damaging still is the tonal shift from Only Fools and Horses to The Long Good Friday. That’s funny too.īut the later sections, detailing the inevitable betrayals and fallings-out, feel culled from an entirely different movie. When the raid is discovered, they laugh at the media’s assumptions that only a foreign crew would now have this degree of know-how. Three cast members from Fred Schepisi's Last Orders – Ray, Michael and Tom – look to be working through a more light-hearted version of that story. The film as a whole is uneven, but at its strongest moments you forget their age and just feel the danger.The opening sequences feature much amusing griping about the modern world. It goes to darker places than you might expect, with Courtenay becoming increasingly manipulative and Broadbent building up a surprising head of menace. The second half, as paranoia sets in among the plunderers, is far more interesting. Not all of the comedy lands, and the thrills are gentle at best. The first half goes for a breezy, Ocean’s Almost-80 vibe, with the score set to jazz and the tough guys bickering over corned-beef sandwiches. It’s fun to watch the characters’ egos clash and to feel the suspense build over the. It boggles the mind, because this should have been a killer outing for Caine, not to mention co-stars Jim Broadbent, Ray. King of Thieves feels surprisingly, if somewhat uncharacteristically, pleasant for a crime movie. But King Of Thieves largely coasts on their charisma, nodding at the stars’ iconic screen moments of yesteryear (in the case of a clumsy end coda, a little too literally) rather than providing them with new ones. The fact is KING OF THIEVES, despite the A plus pedigree, isn’t any good. And seeing these stalwarts of British film interact will likely give you a buzz of your own. There’s no shortage of chemistry: it’s easy to imagine that these guys have been quaffing pints and plotting scores together for decades. And in the most pleasing bit of casting, Jim Broadbent is the gang’s wild card, a hair-trigger psycho who at one point declares, in most un-Broadbentian fashion, “I like the buzz!” Michael Gambon is the doddery, incontinent fence, introduced pissing in a sink. Tom Courtenay is the technophobe, repeatedly failing to grasp the concept of the internet. As Reader, Michael Caine delivers haunted gravitas his character’s wife has just died and he’s the one felon truly torn between going straight, something he promised her he would do, and doing one last job. It’s no fault of the cast, who all seem energised by the opportunity to form a motley ensemble. But while it’s bound to make more of a steal at the box office than its predecessors, it still struggles to turn the source material into a truly gripping yarn. ![]() This latest one, boasting an all-star line-up of elderly British legends, is the most high-profile yet. ![]() It’s no surprise that the tale of their audacious crime, and subsequent downfall, has in the intervening three years been turned into a mini-series and three separate films. In KING OF THIEVES, veteran thief Brian Reader (Michael Caine) loses his beloved wife and finds himself in an empty, quiet house. The gang who made away with a fortune in diamonds were in their sixties and seventies, and headed up by 76-year-old Brian Reader, less a Pink Panther than a grey one. But even more impressive were the ages of the perps. There’s the value of the loot: a cool £14 million, making the 2015 burglary one of the biggest in English legal history. When it comes to the Hatton Garden heist, the numbers are staggering. ![]()
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