King of Thieves: Michael Caine Recruits the Old Gang

They were like a real-life Going in Style, but these retirement aged crooks had sharper elbows. They also pulled off what is considered the biggest heist job in British history. This is the third film version of the unlikely Hatton Garden caper, but the first to reach our shores in any noticeable way. Crime does not pay, not even for seniors, but at least it provides a way to pass the time in James Marsh’s King of Thieves, which releases today on DVD.

Brian Reader didn’t exactly go straight, but he got out of the game relatively on top. Out of his past “known associates,” John “Kenny” Collins is somewhat comfortable, but Terry Perkins, Danny Jones, and Carl Wood are largely scuffling. When “Basil,” a socially awkward security specialist comes to Reader with a potentially lucrative score (a safety deposit company catering to gem merchants), he has no trouble recruiting his old accomplices. The question is whether the recently bereaved Reader’s heart is really in it. Just try doing him dirty and see what happens.

Details of the Hatton Garden heist are still coming to light, even at this late date. Regardless, the Rififi-esque caper business is pretty entertaining, but Joe Penhall’s screenplay focuses more on the subsequent double-crosses.

Of course, the whole point of King is watching Sir Michael Caine do his thing as Reader. He has been stealing jewels in films since before you were born, so show some respect. He’s Michael Bloomin’ Caine and he is terrific as Reader. When he gets hacked off, all that old magic comes back with a vengeance.

As usual, Ray Winstone is as compulsively watchable as ever as the brawler, Jones, while Jim Broadbent takes advantage of the opportunity to finally chew some scenery as the goonish Perkins. Tom Courtenay plays Collins as a bit of a silly duffer, but it is just embarrassing to see Michael Gambon stuck as the butt of jokes as Billy “The Fish” Lincoln, the incontinent fence. Still, there is Caine and Winstone.

Clearly, nobody better understands the appeal of this greybeard A-Team than Marsh because he openly invites nostalgia by incorporating clips from their classic street-smart swinging sixties films, most especially the original Italian Job. British pop-jazz vocalist Jamie Cullum also maintains the cool retro vibe with his groovy, brassy cover of The Killers’ “The Man.”

Harry Brown is still probably the ultimate Michael Caine film, but it is great to see him strut his way through a capery lark, more or less in the tradition of Italian Job and Silver Bears. Recommended for fans of heist movies and the accomplished cast, King of Thieves releases today (3/26) on DVD and BluRay.

Lords of London: The Italian Interlude

For London loan shark Tony Lord, Italy is light years away from the world he knows. He is in Abruzzo, not Naples. How he got there is a mystery to him. Frankly, he sort of has an inkling but he would prefer to ignore the dramatic implications in Antonio Simoncini’s Lords of London (trailer here), which releases today on DVD from Lionsgate.

Essentially, Lord inherited his father’s trade, even though the old troglodyte never took much interest in him. We will witness his dysfunctional formative years through Lords, fils’ many flashbacks. He will have some time for meditation whether he wants it or not. After getting shot by one of the many people he did wrong, Lord wakes up soaked in blood, but otherwise none the worse for wear in dilapidated villa outside a ridiculously picturesque Abruzzo village apparently stuck in the 1950s.

Much to his consternation, the entire village ignores him, except for the twinkly-eyed Francesco. The café owner is concerned the English punk his daughter has been seeing is no good, so he asks Lord to keep an eye on him. Unfortunately, the displaced gangster more than confirms Francesco’s suspicions.

By now you probably have a good guess just who everyone really is and what their relationships to each other are. That means you are exponentially quicker on the up-take than Lord. Yet, for some reason Simoncini insists on nursing his transparent secrets until an anti-climactic third act reveal. Arguably, the film might have been more effective if it had laid all those cards on the table rather than pretending to fool us.

Frankly, as director and screenwriter, Simoncini somewhat bungles the light fantastical elements, inadvertently creating a scenario where Ray Winstone’s Lord Sr. presumably ages about three or four decades in the span of five or six years. Maybe that would be possible during Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent, but not the swinging Macmillan years when he appears to be prowling about.

On the other hand, the ancient village and surrounding countryside look amazing thanks to cinematographer James Friend, who gives it all a classy chiaroscuro-like glow worthy of the Old Masters. Similarly, Giovanni Capalbo (whose wildly diverse credits include both Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Abel Ferrara’s Napoli, Napoli, Napoli) is quite the old Zen charmer as Francesco. He also manages to maintain some sense of mystery regarding what his character is up to. Glen Murphy is also pretty solid as the rather dense Lord, the sort of hardnosed role one could easily imagine Craig Fairbrass assuming. However, Ray Winstone is a surprisingly let-down as the elder Lord. All snarl and no swagger, he just doesn’t seem to be having fun with it.

Simoncini is going for the vibe of warmer, fuzzier Richard Matheson, like Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come. He doesn’t consistently pull it off, but earns credit for trying. At least it always looks great. Recommended for anyone considering an Italian vacation, Lords of London releases today (9/1) on DVD and digital from Lionsgate.

The Gunman: Sean Penn’s Congo Temp Gig

Seriously, why bother assassinating a government official of a failed state? A small team of mercs will do so anyway, because a job is a job. Unfortunately, the shadowy outfit managing the contract has started tying up loose ends. Those would be Jim Terrier and his former comrades-in-arms. He just might be the only left who isn’t part of the conspiracy, but he should be enough to bring them all down in Pierre Morel’s The Gunman (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

For a while, Terrier was really enjoying the Congo assignment. While secretly working for Lawrence Cox’s death squad, he volunteered as a relief coordinator by day to maintain his cover. That is how he met and fell hard for Annie, the professional do-gooder. Unfortunately, just when both their romance and the country’s civil war are heating up, Terrier is assigned to the team taking out an uncooperative natural resources minister looking to renegotiate terms (in real life, the mining companies would just say fine, call us when you have a working legal system). Since he will be the trigger man, Terrier will have to vanish afterwards, leaving Annie to the creepy advances of Felix, his smarmy corporate contact.

Haunted by his collective guilt, Terrier returns to Congo, hoping to do penance, like Jack Bauer in the two-hour special 24: Redemption. However, when an unusually well-equipped hit squad shows up gunning for Terrier, he realizes someone is out to get the old gang, but they all seem to be dead, except for him and the suspiciously chipper Cox. Felix also seems to be acting excessively obnoxious, but that is just sort of how he is. For understandable reasons, his wife Annie has mixed emotions seeing Terrier again, but the sparks are still there. She tries to guilt trip him, pointedly asking: “what did you expect showing up after all this time,” but since they just slept together, things are probably exceeding his expectations (but not necessarily ours).

Frankly, the early scenes of the hard-bitten assassins doubling as relief logistical specialists are rather intriguing and hint at dramatic possibilities the film opts not to take. Of course, we have to deal with the film as it is and not what it might have been. Granted, the narrative drive and internal logic start to sag in the second act, with the former rebounding and the latter utterly imploding down the stretch, but nobody can blame Sean Penn. Gunman is really his coming out party as a middle aged action figure, where he indeed shows he has the chops and the presence. He also clearly put in the time at the gym.

However, Idris Elba is even more impressive, getting second billing over Javier Bardem for maybe two days of work, tops. Appearing as DuPont, the Interpol agent, he just drops in, makes an extended treehouse analogy and then disappears until it’s time for the mopping up. Yet, he is still totally badass. Ray Winstone does his old hardnosed thing as Terrier’s trustworthy associate Stanley and Mark Rylance’s Cox chews on a fair amount of scenery. Frankly, it is hard to know what to make of former Bond villain Bardem, but at least he isn’t playing it safe as the whiny, petulant Felix. On the other hand, it is safe to say Jasmine Trinca (so subtle and earthy in Valeria Golino’s Honey) is woefully wasted as the problematically passive Annie.

There are some nicely executed old school actions scenes in Gunman, but some sequences are undermined by questionable editing. On several occasions it looks like Terrier is in the immediate path of assorted perils, only to find him safely outside the line of fire an abrupt cut or two later. Taken helmer Morel gets the attitude right, but he largely keeps the film on a medium tempo rather than a break neck speed. You just leave the theater suspecting in most alternate universes, this movie is totally awesome, but the one we get is just okay. It will satisfy hardcore Penn fans, but the rest of us should feel no urgent need to rush out to see it when it opens this Friday (3/20) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Dickens Bicentennial: Great Expectations

Just in time for Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday, the BFI discovered what is thought to be the earliest Dickens silent film: G.A. Smith’s The Death of Poor Joe, circa 1901, depicting a brief scene from Oliver Twist. Over one hundred years later, the Dickens canon is still a source of inspiration for both cinema and television. PBS’s Masterpiece Classic celebrates the Dickens Centennial with two new (at least for American audiences) productions, starting this Sunday with Great Expectations (promo here).

Phillip Pirrip is simply known as Pip. It is not just a nickname. It will become his identity. As a young orphan, Pip encounters Abel Magwitch on the moors. Though terrified, the lad helps the escaped convict, at the risk of incurring his guardian older sister’s wrath. Shortly after Magwitch’s capture, Pip is enlisted to serve as the companion to Estella Havisham, the adopted daughter of Miss Havisham, a mysterious spinster with a tragic past.

His trips to Miss Havisham’s Satis House are strange affairs, but they lead Pip to believe her interest will raise him out of his mean station. Yet, as soon as his hopes are raised, his would be patroness arbitrarily dashes them. However, when a mysterious benefactor arranges for Pip to live the life of a gentleman in London and assume a considerable fortune upon reaching legal adulthood, Pip assumes he is back in the Havishams’ good graces.

Yes, this is definitely Great Expectations (Masterpiece’s second adaptation as it happens, and fifteenth Dickens work overall), following the source novel quite scrupulously. The only question is which ending screenwriter Sarah Phelps chose: the more cinematic and canonical upbeat ending or Dickens’ original conclusion favored by critics such as George Orwell.

In fact, her treatment nicely captures the spirit of the great novel, well establishing the major supporting characters so viewers can fully appreciate the significance when they reappear in different contexts. Perhaps most importantly, she and director Brian Kirk devote sufficient time to Pip’s relationship with Herbert Pocket, his onetime rival turned intimate friend. In a way, their friendship proves people can change for the better, which is one of the novel’s central questions.

Expectations should also interest Game of Thrones fans, featuring three alumni: Kirk at the helm, Mark Addy as the blowhard Mr. Pumblechook and Harry Lloyd engagingly earnest as Pocket (a complete departure from the entitled Viserys Targaryen). However, much of the attention will center on Gillian Anderson as a decidedly younger, but rather spooky Miss Havisham. Indeed, her portrayal of an emotional stunted woman almost literally haunted by her past, as well as Kirk’s embrace of the story’s gothic elements, should appeal to genre viewers.

Always reliable, Ray Winstone is perfectly cast as Magwitch, projecting the appropriate ferocity and sensitivity, depending on the circumstances. Masterpiece regular David Suchet also adds a dash of roguish flavor as Mr. Jaggers, the solicitor administering Pip’s trust. Unfortunately, the charisma and chemistry of romantic leads Douglas Booth and Vanessa Kirby is somewhat lacking, but as with most good Dickens productions, Expectations can be easily enjoyed for the secondary characters.

Great Expectations is solidly entertaining television, even if the tragic love story fizzles somewhat. Unequally divided into one and two hour installments, it is freely recommended for its meaty supporting turns and rich period trappings when it premieres on most PBS outlets this Sunday (4/1), concluding a week later (4/8), as part of the current season of Masterpiece.