King of Thieves; what's it really telling us.

King of Thieves can’t make its mind up whether it’s a comedy or a drama, which makes it pretty lifelike, but would be a disaster if they hadn’t simplified the problem by hiring a cast of old stagers who could make the characters come to life either way. It’s a movie about a jewellery heist which ends in disaster. Ealing used to do this all the time, making genial comedy out of failed robberies in a time when people weren’t supposed to get away with their crimes but still needed to be loveable enough that you kind of hoped they would. Time moves on, and we don’t be doing that kind of thing any more, so it’s not an Ealing movie at all.

It’s based - I’ve no idea how loosely - on the real world robbery of the Hatton Garden diamond vault in 2015, which was carried out by a bunch of geriatrics who briefly amazed the world by pulling off an apparently perfect robbery before getting caught by police who used modern technology to pin them down with CCTV and phone triangulation.  As brought to life by Caine, Gambon, Broadbent, Courtenay and Winstone, they come off as a bunch of a curmudgeonly old gits who brought themselves down by a mixture of hubris and mutual distrust. They’re utterly believable as a group of old men struggling with both modernity and a lifetime of mistakes and unresolved arguments. It feels true, but you’d hate to be stuck in a lift with them.

It’s also a movie which simply keeps the camera on its stars. Francesca Annis is the only speaking female presence, briefly there as Caine’s wife, whose death seems to have jolted him out of quiet retirement into the notion of one last job. The police circling the gang in the aftermath of the heist are never seen speaking; they wordlessly pass files to each other or sit watchfully in the shadows until finally they pounce, modern, diverse and armed to the teeth. The huge back catalogue of all the old stagers lets the director cut to flashback of the crooks’ heydays, dropping in clips from older movies to suggest what they were like in their prime; to be honest, it’s a gimmick which would have worked better if it had been less flashy. When it’s used for the last time, as the lags walk off to be sentenced, it works best, slow and dignified.

Well, it’s an anti-Ealing. But more than that, it’s a metaphor for something else. The heist is planned meticulously, even though the plan doesn’t quite work. It’s striking that there’s nothing like the same amount of planning for the aftermath. It’s almost as though the gang never really thought they’d get away with it, so they didn’t need a plan for fencing off the loot or sharing it out. As soon as they’re clear, they start to fall out and squabble over the division of the spoils, with no apparent sense of the value of what they’ve stolen or who might be able to shift it for them. And I started to think that it was all just like Brexit; a gang of backward looking people planning a spectacular coup with no plan for the follow up, only to be brought down by mutual distrust and a failure to understand how the modern world works.