Dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003, US, 110 mins
Cast:
Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Donald Sutherland, Seth Green, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Frangy G
Studios are pumping out more movies than ever before and yet finding themselves with increasingly less to say. The way the studios are resurrecting old movies and TV shows, you'd think the world had simply run dry of ideas. Based on the film written by troy Kennedy Martin, thirty years on from the original film starring Michael Caine, The Italian Job has been given the Hollywood treatment. But F. Gary Gray's remake of The Italian Job works because it's hardly a remake at all but more of a homage to the first film.
The original Italian Job, an English production, spawned three generations of comedy-oriented heist movies. Gray's Italian Job is a slicker, faster-paced, high-tech upgrade that lifts the sprightly spirit and the main action set piece from the original while developing its own twists and a new ending that, although a bit too pat and eager to please.
In the 1969 version of this crime caper, a crew of cockney blokes create a massive traffic jam in Torino and make off with three Mini-Coopers full of gold bullion. Here an American crew perform the same stunt in Los Angeles with souped-up new Minis, where the gang blows up part of the L.A. traffic system and most of the movie's credibility but first they pull off a sleek boost in Venice to satisfy the requirement of the title. In between there's a deadly double cross and a boatload of sexual tension between Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron.
The original cast featured Michael Caine, Noël Coward, and funny man Benny Hill as a computer hacker. Wahlberg assumes the Caine role as Charlie Croker, the meticulous mastermind, and he has plenty of talented support in Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Donald Sutherland, and Seth Green. Director F. Gary Gray (Set It Off and A Man Apart) gives the adventure a glossy, whiz-bang updating. Safes drop through floors, sinkholes magically appear in downtown LA, and there's an enthralling chase through the waterways of Venice: it all makes for a pleasing, if preposterous, spectacle.
It's an entertaining picture, classy and well executed, but as much as any film seen recently, this lush new version tends to prove that, where thrillers are concerned, 'more' is often less. The opening Venetian heist scene in The Italian Job is one of the more exciting and gorgeously shot action scenes. In it, the filmmakers introduce almost all their main characters and dazzle us with state-of-the-art technology. It's an amazing sequence, obviously modeled on the James Bond thrillers - two of which, Die Another Day and The World Is Not Enough, were written by two Italian Job scribes, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. As the thieves drill and blast their way through ravishing rooms festooned with magnificent art and furnishings, communicating by walkie-talkie and meshing like clockwork, director Gray and company pull off their biggest coup.
The great heist thrillers were grim and mordant - and, most important, believable. But consider the extremes to which writers Purvis and Wade (who were uncredited) and Donna Powers and Wayne Powers have gone here. To keep audience sympathy, the thieves in The Italian Job are not robbing for pure gain, but exacting retribution upon a heartless murderer who double-crossed them. The heists themselves are so preposterously over-scaled that it's hard to take them seriously on any level. The logistics of the first Italian Job were preposterous. But even though we are in the cybernetic era, the second robbery in this movie would tax the resources of a small country, let alone a professional gang.
The climactic robbery here becomes less dramatic and involving because it's so outlandishly out of scale. But that doesn't mean the movie doesn't offer up some compensating humor and tongue-in-cheek style. Most of the laughs come from Statham as the incorrigible seducer Handsome Rob, and from Seth Green as Lyle, a computer obsessive whose big quirk is a belief that he invented Napster before it was stolen by a college roommate (played by real-life Napster head Shawn Fanning). Most of the rest of the cast is colorful and fun to watch, too; Norton is a good villain and Theron a fetching heroine.
At bottom, Italian Job is an assembly-line product, even if it looks more like a Jaguar than an Edsel. Though Gray, as in The Negotiator, proves himself a clever action choreographer, he can't make us believe much of this, not even as much as Steven Soderbergh managed to in his recent hit remake of Ocean's 11 . Gray should have remembered one of the cardinal rules of Rififi and most of the other heist classics: What's important about a movie robbery is not how big it is, but how much you believe in it.
Still, The Italian Job is a smooth, fairly standard, fairly enjoyable little time waster with a few good chases both on land and sea, some deft acting and a smattering of amusing one-liners to keep us from walking out of the theater. That one forgets the movie the minute one leaves the theatre is pretty much par for the course for this genre anyway. Shizana Arshad
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