On the heels of watching The Muppet Christmas Carol with the family last night, I decided I was still in a Michael Caine mood, so I chose 1969's The Italian Job from the list today.
It is, shall we say, a muddle.
For me, what makes heist movies work are the characters. Introduce the characters to me well, and then do an incredible heist, and you've got me hooked.
The heist in this film is pretty good, with a lot of action, some fun cinematography, and what you'd expect from a car chase.
The characterizations, not so much. We get to see Michael Caine's character developed a bit. And you get a little bit of Benny Hill's character -- enough to know he likes the ladies chubby. But that's about it. All the rest of the characters, you could swap them in and out of roles and the movie would be about the same. There's quite a bit going on in the first half of the film, but little of it has to do with establishing characters.
Also, the editing is really choppy. In once scene, they're all shown leaving their mansion hideout. Then one's at the airport, getting his moll out of the action. Another's getting arrested -- Benny Hill, for feeling up a lady. Then they're back at the mansion hideout leaving again, or so I assume. Maybe I don't really know who's coming and going. But the film does a pretty poor job of maintaining continuity.
One of the plot points has to do with changing a reel-t-reel tape at a power plant, or something, as part of the heist. They show the exchange. Then the keep cutting to some kind of control center to show monitors going off or something, but all of the dialogue -- except for one scene -- is done in Italian. It's hard to know what's going on.
Apparently, there's a Mark Wahlberg remake, which might be worth looking at, but based on the trailer, I'm a bit dubious.
I wanted to like this film. But at the end, it was just too muddled to like.
This is a throwback to 1996, and it shows. There were THREE phone calls placed from public payphones in this film. THREE. And as a Christmas movie, it does hit all the Hollywood holiday buttons:
1. No mention of Jesus or Christianity; it's secular all the way ho ho ho.
2. Dad, played by Ahnold Schwarzenneger, is an incompetent workaholic.
3. The town -- which at one point feels smallish, then has a small downtown skyline, then a HUGE downtown skyline -- drips with holiday trimmings with EVERY house decorated to the hilt and lots of piles of snow but nobody has frosty breath and there's a threatened ice storm and it's night and then it's day and there are people caroling in FULL DICKENSIAN REGALIA.
Oh, folks, it was bad. They were going through the motions of making a Christmas movie and they really wanted it to have a heart, but the heart was that the kid gave away the toy he wanted because Dad became a full-fledge copy of the toy, and will probably go back to his incompetence after the New Year.
Do not watch.
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