BEFORE: We spent most of Friday night dealing with plumbers, who came to fix a big leak under the kitchen sink - but since they had to charge us a minimum for the service call, we found other things for them to do around the house, like repairing two toilets, one that was always running and the other one that wouldn't flush unless you lifted up the tank cover and pulled out the stopper by hand. Also they were able to lift up the vanity in the basement, sink and all, a couple of inches so that my wedding ring could be retrieved. It fell back there last year after I knocked it off the soap dish, which is where I store it while shaving. I couldn't figure out how to move the vanity without breaking the pipes and causing a flood in the basement, so I waited until we had a professional on site.
Ian McShane carries over again from "Pottersville".
THE PLOT: Brutal gangster Don Logan recruits "retired" safecracker Gal for one last job, but it goes badly for both of them.
AFTER: I don't even know if I fully understand where this film is coming from - I've heard various things about it over the years, and it seems to have gotten a lot of attention, one magazine even named it as the 15th greatest British film of all time. I beg to differ, because it's a heist movie that feels like it falls short at depicting the heist itself.
Instead, the majority of the film's running time is devoted to mobster Don Logan trying to convince the safecracker, Gal, to come out of retirement, and each time Gal refuses, Don asks again. Repeat as necessary for the first hour of the film, which is about 2/3 of the total running time. It occurs to me that the most interesting part of the heist should be the committing of the heist, though I'll allow some time for the planning and research. Part of "Logan Lucky" and "Ocean's Eight" were the set-up for the crime, but in neither case did those films spend the bulk of the film trying to talk one member into joining the crew. Seriously, it's ONE HOUR of the film devoted to Don traveling to Spain to get Gal on board.
OK, there's some dramatic tension involved, as we cross over at some point from him ASKING to him DEMANDING, and making veiled threats toward Gal's family and friends if he doesn't come out of retirement, but this same plot element was integral to "John Wick: Chapter 2" and only took about 5 minutes of screen time there. Not ONE HOUR.
By comparison, the heist seems relatively straight-forward, just drill into the bank's safe-deposit boxes from next door - the unique thing is that there's a pool next door, so the drilling and the collection is done underwater, using scuba gear. But then if the heist turns out to be as "foolproof" as the planners said, then that only lessens the screen time devoted to the heist, and as I've seen in other heist films, something usually goes wrong somewhere, which has the double-advantage of feeling more realistic (Murphy's Law) as well as eating up a bit more screen time as the thieves improvise a Plan "B" or "C". No such luck here.
Of course, there's more to the story that I'm not going to reveal here, the film chooses to play around with the timestream and show you later what happened before, which preserves the juicy secret bits for later, but then compromises cause and effect rules at the same time. So I believe that some odd choices were made here in the storytelling, and that most of them were not advantageous ones.
Additionally, it was hard for me to understand the very think British accents - usually about 30 minutes into a film with Brits my brain sort of kicks in and I find their rhythms and then have an easier time of it, but here I really needed some subtitles. However, I was watching from a DVD I made last year off premium cable, and subtitles were therefore unavailable - I can only use them on live/OnDemand or on Netflix or iTunes.
Also starring Ray Winstone (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "War Machine"), Amanda Redman, James Fox (last seen in "The Chase"), Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Alvaro Monje
RATING: 3 out of 10 broken pool tiles
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