Film

Hardly the belated Doris Day vehicle that its trailer suggests, Flawless is a diverting, confident heist thriller that permits its two leads to chip out of their respective typecasting sand traps, if only slightly. We’re in ’60s London, and Moore, surprisingly convincing, is Laura Quinn, an Oxford-educated American businesswoman at London Diamond Corporation, which keeps passing her over for managerial positions. Laura literally tallies her indignities, evidently so LonDi’s janitor (Caine, attempting to fuse his Get Carter and Cider House Rules personae) can steal and read the slips of paper. Sensing a fellow malcontent, he proposes a scheme to rob the vault, LonDi’s new security-camera system be damned.

As Flawless reveals the contortions of its plot—Lambert Wilson is suitably smarmy as a nosy insurance investigator—it also ratchets up its self-seriousness; a sewer pursuit seems to have been expressly designed to elicit citations of The Third Man, both visually and thematically. The pleasure of heist movies is usually found in the thrill of the chase, not so much in what the hero learns, and a present-day framing device featuring an apparently reverse-Botoxed Moore proves close to disastrous, recontextualizing the events that came before it. Until then, though, Flawless more than compensates for its rough edges.