King of Thieves review: Real-life heist flick is refreshingly short on glamour

James Marsh’s film about the ageing crew behind the 2015 Hatton Garden heist is packed with fine performances from some of British cinema's best-loved names

Dir James Marsh, 108 mins, starring: Michael Caine, Charlie Cox, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone

Don’t come to King of Thieves expecting an Ealing-style comedy about a gang of lovable old rogues. James Marsh’s film tells the story of the ageing criminals behind the Hatton Garden heist in 2015 – and the robbers here are a very unpleasant bunch indeed. One of the most refreshing aspects of the film is that they are all shown in their full greed and malevolence.

They’re being played by some of Britain’s best-loved and most familiar screen actors (Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone, Paul Whitehouse and Michael Gambon) but Marsh and his screenwriter Joe Penhall rarely go in search of easy laughs or indulge in false nostalgia.

Britain has always loved and romanticised its gangsters, whether it’s the Krays (the subject of a successful film from King of Thieves producers Working Title) or “Mad” Frankie Fraser. Here, though, the villains are very short on glamour. When you’re relying on hearing aids and social security, it’s hard to pretend that you’re Al Capone.

As a thriller, the film is on the rickety side. Like its protagonists with their type 2 diabetes, bad knees and replacement hips, it struggles to build up much momentum or suspense. Marsh resorts again and again to music-driven montage sequences to try to make the heist itself seem exciting.

Even so, he can’t squeeze dramatic juice out of scenes of desiccated old men in a north London vault over an Easter bank holiday weekend, struggling to drill a hole through a wall as their lookout snoozes in a building opposite. This is a character piece, not an action movie.

Its richness lies in the exceptional performances and the very frank and perceptive way in which these small-time crooks’ machinations and backstabbing are laid bare.

Caine is cast as Brian Reader, the “king” of the thieves… until his nerve goes (or he loses his “arsehole” as his colleagues inelegantly put it when Reader begins to have doubts about the job). He has been on the fiddle all his life. His criminal career started when he stole a tin of peaches aged 13 and has escalated from there.

Caine plays him beautifully. Reader is an old and distinguished looking man, getting over the loss of his wife. He loves his jazz. His criminal past seems far behind him. Unlike his other OAP accomplices, he seems affluent enough but thieving is a compulsion for him.

As Caine shows, Reader can switch in an instant from geniality to snarling malice. He is cunning, vain and high-handed. When pushed into a corner, he can be very unpleasant indeed.

Late on in the film, we see one of his henchmen, John Kenny Collins (Tom Courtenay) at the swimming baths with Billy “the fish” (Michael Gambon). Collins and Billy are conspiring together when Collins, who is hard of hearing, suddenly farts in the water. “Better out than in,” he tells Billy.

This isn’t the kind of moment you ever find in a Michael Mann heist movie. You don’t expect Al Pacino or Robert De Niro to break wind but the British thieves here have as much of a struggle against their bodily functions and decaying faculties as they do against the police.

Courtenay brings a beatific, Stan Laurel-like innocence to his role. His friendly outward demeanour doesn’t hide his treacherous nature. Even more startling is Jim Broadbent as Terry Perkins, a grandfatherly type with a mean and sadistic streak. We are so used to seeing Broadbent playing the genial everyman that his aggression here comes as a shock.

Ray Winstone’s Danny is (as Reader calls him) a “shagger”. Women like him. 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. Winstone gets one of the best and most chilling moments in the film.

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. 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. Once he’s drawn in, he can’t get away.

The old-timers are relentlessly patronising towards their young accomplice, Basil (Charlie Cox). They mock him in homophobic language because he takes the care to wear a disguise. 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.

Throughout the film, Marsh throws in subliminal references to the swinging Sixties and to the illustrious pasts of actors like Caine and Courtenay. On one level, this is another film about the dying of the light. 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.

The filmmakers can’t resist a few comic asides. These have to do with the thieves’ deafness, their struggle to crawl through small holes or their inability to come to terms with the internet. The police, who initially think they are dealing with a gang of hardened Albanians, very quickly discover that the robbers are proudly British – and as inept as they are cunning.

Some audiences may be disappointed that King of Thieves isn’t more of a lark along the lines of The Lavender Hill Mob. (The film is based on a magazine article called “The Over The Hill Mob.”) Marsh, though, should be congratulated for doing his ancient protagonists the favour of taking them at least semi-seriously and for showing that OAPs can be scumbags too.

‘King of Thieves’ is in cinemas from 14 September