Day 121 - 5/1/09 - Movie #119
BEFORE: It's another heist film, similar to "The Brink's Job" - except the target is a British train loaded with gold.
THE PLOT: In Victorian England, a master criminal makes elaborate plans to steal a shipment of gold from a moving train.
AFTER: A big pothole can ruin a street, but a big PLOT-hole can ruin a film. This movie has a plot-hole so huge it threatens to swallow up the whole premise, and after noticing it, the story fell apart faster than Donald Sutherland's phony British accent. If you want to play along at home, stop reading, go and watch this film, then report back...
Now there's this safe, on a train, and it's transporting gold bars to pay the soldiers fighting in the Crimean War. (I don't see how you can pay soldiers in large gold ingots on a battlefield, but that's another issue...) Now, the safe requires 4 keys to open it (this is before combination locks) and 2 keys are stored in the railway station in London, and the other keys are held by a bank manager and a government official (also in London). Do you see the problem?
If all of the keys are in London, and the train LEAVES London, to take the gold to a ship - how the heck do the train officials open the safe at the other end of the trip? I have other quibbles - like why don't and of the train's passengers hear Sean Connery's character walking on the roof of the train, and jumping from car to car? And how did the police know to arrest him in the train station? That wasn't made clear at all.
This film was written and directed by Michael Crichton, and I expected better - or at least fewer glaring mistakes. OK, so on the Wikipedia page devoted to this film, it mentions that the London officials held DUPLICATE keys to the safe - so why couldn't the movie make this distinction?
RATING: 4 out of 10 lead bars
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ReplyDeleteI really loved the book by Micheal Crichton, so I tracked down this movie and watched it a while ago. The book included facinating facts about the way of thinking at the time and other historical tibits. (too bad I found out later from reading Rising Sun that Michael Crichton flubs some of his facts).
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, this film loses all of the facinating facts and is more of a Brinks Job on a train, set in the 1800s. A half decent film, but not much more.