Following the death of his wife Brian Reader ends up coming out of retirement when Basil tells him of a deposit safe which could easily be target for burglary. This causes a crew of retired crooks to get greedy one last time!
Considering The Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary only happened in 2015, so for a film to be released three years later it is a pretty quick turn around! I am left wondering if this has therefore been rushed out, as the trailer made it feel like a totally different film to the full feature.
Brian Reader is the man who brings the whole thing together and the group all in their 60s and 70s expect for one Basil, use the skills they have acquired over the years to pull off one of the biggest robberies. Using the long Easter weekend to get everything sorted with it and managing to escape with over £200 million worth of stolen jewels and money! But will that be the case when the police begin to investigate the scene and CCTV footage around the area?
I guess that is where a film like this is pretty tricky as if you can remember he story you will already know the ending and with it being based on that real story you can therefore find out how it goes. Although something this big I guess the ending was always going to be a little bit obvious.
As I mentioned earlier the full film is not all as it seems and the dialogue is rather weak, so much so that a lot of it is plied with swearing which I guess is supposed to be amusing with the age of the men. Don't get me wrong though a couple of times I did find myself laughing at the exchanges. But it felt that it was used to cover over the weakness in the script. We don't fully find out why each of the men decide to take part, small things are mentioned but for better character development we should have been given more of a background around them.
None of the men actually trusted one another and would very easily screw the others over to have a larger share of the money. Brian actually takes himself out of the heist when he has seconds thoughts but I guess it was all too late by then. We are supposed to feel sorry for him and I think that actually worked, the sympathy we felt towards him. Despite finding out a little of his background. Terry Perkins was more of the loose cannon especially spending a lot of time with the younger Danny Jones. Basil actually creating the whole thing is then forgotten about and it doesn't make a huge amount of sense why he wanted to get involved with these old men!
I guess performance wise we knew what to expect from these actors. They were let down my the dialogue but I thought Broadbent was the best and stood out the most in his scenes. Cannot complain about the cast they put together for this one, which just leaves me wishing the script had actually been stronger for them as surely this really could have created such a strong and good film. Charlie Cox did well in his limited amount of screen timeIt will be interesting to see how this does at the box office on its full release after preview screenings have just taken place.
