When I saw the trailer for The Italian Job a couple of months back, I thought to myself, “So this is where I go see something else and sneak into the last couple of minutes to see how it all plays out.” The preview had the set up, the heist, the motivation, a few choice chase clips and even one of the major plot points that would have been best served as a surprise. It went on to show how the plan was going to play out and suggest even what the outcome might be. Essentially, with a minimal amount of filling in the blanks the entire movie was condensed into one two-minute clip complete with a beginning, middle and end. Now after watching the full-length cut I wish I’d spent the additional 102 minutes doing something more productive like staying at home and going comatose in front of the Speed Channel.
The film begins with a heist and a clever one at that. A band of thieves, who are more sporting by nature than your traditional bad guys and therefore much cooler, snatch a safe with more than $30 million worth of gold bars. A boat race through the normally tranquil and romantic Venice canals ensues. It was the stuff that legends are made of and 80’s TV thrived off of. But when one of their own plays the double cross card The Italian Job switches into revenge mode where everyone has to come together for one more job.
As expected with such a genre piece, F. Gary Gray (A Man Apart) offers some slick direction to go along with a cool-cat soundtrack. In recent years on-screen car chases have focused more on speed than driving. It’s a brawn over brains approach that is thrilling the first few times around but becomes boring very quickly. Using the new Austin Mini as the car of choice in The Italian Job takes away the power side of the chase and brings it back to a time when driving was just as much wit and creativity than it was horsepower. The problem with making the Mini so obvious and up front is that it reeks of obvious product placement. At times it felt like more of a commercial than the shorts BMW commissioned for a clever advertising campaign.
I’ve never been a big fan of characters using the nickname game as a catch all for characterization. It makes it to easy to get simplistic and here it is no different. Early on you meet the likes of Handsome Rob (Jason Statham) who is, you guessed it, a lady’s man. Then there’s Left-Ear (rapper Mos Def), the resident explosives expert who lost half his hearing back in grade school with a cherry bomb closer to the size of an apple. Lyle (Seth Green) wants to get in on the nicknames so he dubs himself the Napster since he says the revolutionary file-swapping software was his idea stolen by his ex-roommate. Lyle’s constant whining is downright annoying. While Green has made a career out of playing the ‘cool dork,’ he and his character would have been better served with more depth especially when you’re basing his motivation on be ripped off of a business that hasn’t been heard of for more than a year.
When you give all the surprises away with your advertising months in advance, you’d better have some clever twists. The Italian Job is a competent enough feature with cool cars and a bass-heavy soundtrack but with its simplistic characters and mediocre plot, customized wheels and techno riffs just aren’t enough.
The Italian Job Gallery
Trailer
