Film reviews: King of Thieves, Crazy Rich Asians and The Predator

KING OF THIEVES ★★✩✩✩ (15, 108 mins) Director: James Marsh Stars: Michael Caine, Charlie Cox, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone, Michael Gambon

At the last count, there are eight movies about “The Essex Boys”, a gang of steroid-addled, drug-dealing, meathead bouncers who met their end in the Rettendon Range Rover murders of 1995. Now it seems the new obsession is the veteran gang of career criminals who made off with £14million of Londoners’ savings in the Hatton Garden robbery of 2015.

King Of Thieves is the third film about the heist and the second to get a theatrical release. On paper, this had a lot more going for it than The Hatton Garden Job last year. It had Oscar-winning director James Marsh on board, a healthy budget, a cast packed with talented veteran actors and a script from Joe Penhall, the writer of Netflix’s brilliant true-crime series Mindhunter.

Yet this muddled caper ends up telling a familiar tale – about the plucky outsider who discovers he is in over his head.

Oxford graduate Marsh was right at home in the dreaming spires with his Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory Of Everything but he’s completely out of his depth with this London crime flick.

In case you need a quick recap, the heist saw 77-year-old career criminal Brian Reader (here played by Sir Michael Caine) assemble a gang of veteran thieves (Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Paul Whitehouse, Ray Winstone) along with a younger inside man (Charlie Cox).

The target was Hatton Garden’s safe deposit storage unit and the crime was astonishingly easy. The gang just used a key to the building over the Easter bank holiday weekend and instead of blowing the door off the vault, they drilled a big hole in the wall.

Marsh’s staging of the robbery feels realistically messy as the master criminals bicker, the drill conks out and a couple of the supposedly steely thieves lose their nerve.

But I suspect it was Marsh’s attempt to add an authentic edge to the glossy crime caper that was his undoing.

On some level we need to root for the old rogues for the plot to carry suspense. But you get the feeling Marsh, who won his Oscar for the documentary Man On Wire, thought we wouldn’t like what we found if he let us inside their heads. Unable to create sympathy without sacrificing authenticity, he tries to win us over with broad comedy.

We are introduced to the gang at a wake held for Reader’s wife. As the guests line up to pay their respects the thieves laugh, swear, and loudly reminisce about old violent crimes. One of them even performs a handstand. The jaunty music suggests this is riotously amusing but the witless script seems to play a different game entirely.

As the men go on to plot the heist while complaining of aching joints and dodgy hearts, that score keeps chirping away. It seems their age is the sole source of comedy and our only reason to care.

Marsh’s most interesting idea is to place the robbery at the film’s midpoint so he can give equal weight to the aftermath. As we see these horrible old men turn on each other, the film seems to be deliberately working against the grain of the knockabout first half.

Marsh deserves some credit for demythologising the Cockney crime film in the second half but a better story would have played these two tones together. In Goodfellas, Scorsese let us feel the lure of a life of violent crime while also being repelled by it. In the hapless King Of Thieves the real crime is the waste of talent.

CRAZY RICH ASIANS ★★★✩✩ (12A, 121 mins) Director: Jon M Chu Stars: Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding

Crazy Rich Asians caused a media furore in America when it became the shock hit of the summer. As it had an all-Asian cast it was quickly hailed as a sign of a more progressive, more inclusive, Hollywood.

Turns out, it’s nothing of the sort. This fluffy rom-com taps into a hunger for an older kind of American entertainment. Wealth porn was hugely popular in aspirational 1950s America, where it was served with a slice of irony by director Douglas Sirk in “women’s pictures” like Written On The Wind.

Here director Jon M Chu serves it completely straight. He spends so long lingering over designer dresses, eye-wateringly expensive jewellery and lavish interiors he almost forgets the Cinderella plot.

His heroine is Rachel (Constance Wu), a beautiful Chinese-American who somehow has no idea that her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding) is the heir to one of the world’s biggest property empires. Sadly Rachel, the last person in the West to discover Google, is just a lowly professor of economics at a top American university.

That doesn’t cut it with Nick’s mother (Michelle Yeoh), who is determined that her son only breeds with the daughter of another billionaire.

Rachel discovers his wealth and his snobby mother when he invites her to Singapore for a family wedding. Can Rachel keep her man and get her hands on his fortune?

Who cares? There are some funny lines, and rapper Awkwafina makes a decent fist of playing the quirky best friend. But the real thrills come from watching a bachelor party on a huge freighter packed with Miss World contestants. If that doesn’t float your boat, what about a hen night that kicks off with a trolley dash in a designer boutique? For around £15, you can have tickets to both.

THE PREDATOR ★★✩✩✩ (15, 107 mins) Director: Shane Black Stars: Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn

He has been making regular sorties into our cinemas for three decades but The Predator may have finally put an end to the world’s toughest alien.

The beauty of the 1987 original was its simplicity. In one corner, we had a space monster armed with an invisibility cloak and array of high-tech weapons. In the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger armed with giant muscles and an array of cheesy one-liners. In the needlessly fussy fourth instalment, director Shane Black gives us more monsters, more jokes, more subplots and very little reason to care.

When two space ships packed with aliens land on Earth it falls upon Olivia Munn’s biologist, Boyd Holbrook’s army sniper and a coach load of mentally ill veteran soldiers to fight them off.

The action scenes are forgettable, the mythology is confusing and the bad taste comedy is hopelessly off-target.