![]() They might as well have blasted the vault open with a tank. Why, then, do the men in King of Thieves, who’ve supposedly lived a lifetime of villainy, know none of this? They bumble through their heist, doze off while on lookout, pull up in flashy cars, bicker like amateurs, break tools, and otherwise go out of their way to be as noticeable as possible. I also know that you shouldn’t publicly discuss your crime in plain English. What I know of robbery I’ve learned from these movies, so I know how important it is to case a target, or how it is imperative to conceive of every possible contingency, to plan the act, think of a getaway and to generally succeed. It’s entertaining, isn’t it? To observe the various schemes and marvel at some of the truly ingenious ways humans trick other humans out of everything they value. Now, I’m not a trained burglar, so I usually relish heist movies for the way they open a window to an alien lifestyle of risk and excess. These are a bunch of grumpy, sour, crass, impenetrable old men, played by skilled actors who look as tired to be in the movie as the movie itself. What mischievous urges prompted them to resurface I’ll never know, not least because King of Thieves makes no attempt to clarify them, or indeed to shape its characters into anyone I’d want to care about. The perpetrators were, rather surprisingly, dudes in their 60s and 70s, who had all been professional thieves in the past and still lived comfortable everyday lives in the heart of the city. The movie is based on the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary in London, in which upwards of £20 million was stolen from a vault-full of safety deposit boxes. Usually that would be enough, but somehow, in some confounded way, none of it works. Now we have King of Thieves, a kinda heist comedy that believes it will succeed simply because it stars established veterans, is based on true events, and is very, very British. Occasionally, one will try to be more insightful than the others, like Paolo Sorrentino’s male-gazing Youth (2015). Or Going in Style (2017), about retirees planning to rob a bank after losing their pensions. The crooks are staging their robbery not just because several of them are in dire financial straits but because they can’t bear the idea of their own increasing irrelevance.It seems that studios believe there is an aching popular desire for movies about elderly geezers who try to defy their age by doing stupid things, like Last Vegas (2013), where a bunch of old fogeys tripped to Vegas and behaved like frat boys on spring break. On one level, this is another film about the dying of the light. Throughout the film, Marsh throws in subliminal references to the swinging Sixties and to the illustrious pasts of actors like Caine and Courtenay. They try to bully him and to muscle him out of his share of the loot but he is a shadowy figure who, it is implied, may have been manipulating the old geezers all along. They mock him in homophobic language because he takes the care to wear a disguise. The old-timers are relentlessly patronising towards their young accomplice, Basil (Charlie Cox). ![]() Arguably the most sympathetic of the motley crew is the hapless Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse), who would far rather be tending his allotment than committing robbery. When the gang finally make it through the hole in the wall to the safety deposit boxes, he lets out a huge, primal, I’m-the-daddy-now style roar. Winstone gets one of the best and most chilling moments in the film. He stands on his head and performs stunts to get people to pay attention to him but we are left in no doubt that he is a vicious thug with a huge chip on his shoulder. Ray Winstone’s Danny is (as Reader calls him) a “shagger”.
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