When it comes to the Hatton Garden heist, the numbers are staggering. There’s the value of the loot: a cool £14 million, making the 2015 burglary one of the biggest in English legal history. But even more impressive were the ages of the perps. 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. 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. This latest one, boasting an all-star line-up of elderly British legends, is the most high-profile yet. 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.
It’s no fault of the cast, who all seem energised by the opportunity to form a motley ensemble. 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. Tom Courtenay is the technophobe, repeatedly failing to grasp the concept of the internet. Paul Whitehouse is the broke one. Ray Winstone is the lippy fireplug. Michael Gambon is the doddery, incontinent fence, introduced pissing in a sink. 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!”
Not all of the comedy lands, and the thrills are gentle at best.
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 seeing these stalwarts of British film interact will likely give you a buzz of your own. 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 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. Not all of the comedy lands, and the thrills are gentle at best. The second half, as paranoia sets in among the plunderers, is far more interesting. It goes to darker places than you might expect, with Courtenay becoming increasingly manipulative and Broadbent building up a surprising head of menace. The film as a whole is uneven, but at its strongest moments you forget their age and just feel the danger.
