An attempt at a super cool, stylish crime caper, a la Guy Ritchie, The Hatton Garden Job falls flat on its face because, well, Guy Ritchie didn’t make it. Imagine a Vauxhall Nova with a very expensive body kit, big noisy exhaust and go faster stripes down the sides. To the driver it might feel and sound like they’re driving a car from The Fast and the Furious franchise but to everyone else, it just looks like a Vauxhall Nova with some money thrown at it. And thrown in all the wrong places.
Based on the real life events that took place in April 2015 – Ronnie Thompson is the first, and unlikely to be the last, director to bring this remarkable story to the silver screen, of when four elderly men pulled off the heist of the century – stealing over £200m worth of items.
There are some vaguely amusing glimpses of interest but this is only because the cast are of a good(e) calibre and trying their best to create a sense of camaraderie, featuring the likes of Matthew Goode, Larry Lamb, Phil Daniels and David Calder. However, sadly, just as soon as one of these glimpses arises, it’s instantly squashed either by audibly ‘written’ dialogue or suspension-killing editing or banal framing. Often all three concurrently.
Bereft of any tension, suspense or directorial craft, The Hatton Garden Job suffers from pacing issues, is undermined by some bad acting in ancillary roles and is delivered through poor cinematography. Goode is wasted and miscast in a role that Danny Dyer could, and possibly should, have chewed up. Joely Richardson seems just as confused as to why she’s even there as we are by her (apparently) Hungarian accent. The only entertaining sequence, in an otherwise boring accumulation of tangibly expiring moments, is the actual robbery itself. And even that is spoiled by a clunky attempt at a punchy and energetic montage (trying so hard to be Ocean’s Eleven) that drags and over-sells to the point of nausea.
Then the ‘job’ is called off. Then it’s back on. And all the time there’s no sense of jeopardy or drama, so you don’t really care what happens either way. Stir in the polystyrene characters, as hollow as they are disposable, and it only serves to exacerbate the feeling that you’re watching a bad film. The only real heist here is of the audience’s time.
The Hatton Garden Job is released on April 14th
