The 2015 Hatton Garden robbery in London – when a small group of mostly pensioner thieves pulled off a multimillion-pound diamond and cash heist over Easter weekend – is a cracking story in itself. But this rush-job British movie, with Larry Lamb playing veteran crim Brian Reader and Matthew Goode as the anonymous younger robber who got away (the others were eventually locked up), is a creaky snore that manages to make the whole affair seem deeply unexciting.
It fails even to communicate the details of the robbery with any confidence or panache. Director and co-writer Ronnie Thompson tries to give his real-life tale energy by indulging the odd jazzy camera move or music choice, and does offer the camp pleasure of Joely Richardson as a Hungarian gangster in shoulder pads. ‘Today is Good Friday,’ she purrs, deadpan, to a criminal underling. ‘You have until the Resurrection.’ But the script is a plodder, walking us through everything we already know, gradually letting the air out of a killer yarn and refusing to state anything but the obvious.
