King of Thieves
All actors and roles (10)
All team (45)
Short description
King of Thieves is a crime drama based on the 2015 Hatton Garden Safe Deposit burglary in London. Brian Reader, a retired thief whose wife has died and whose old associates are behind bars, is unwilling to settle into quiet retirement. He assembles a crew of ageing criminals to rob the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company, planning what becomes one of the largest burglaries in British history. Posing as workmen, the men get inside the vault and make off with a fortune in jewels and cash. Once the job is done, suspicions and disagreements over dividing the proceeds begin to pull the group apart.
James Marsh directed the film from a screenplay by Joe Penhall. It was released in 2018, between Marsh's The Theory of Everything and The Mercy, and is the sixth of the nine features he has directed. Michael Caine leads as Brian Reader, with Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon and Ray Winstone among the gang, and Charlie Cox as Basil. The production was mounted by Working Title Films with StudioCanal and partners in Belgium, France and the United States, and runs 108 minutes.
On IMDb, the film holds 5.6 out of 10 from around 18,000 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 5.6 out of 10, from roughly 468 votes. A critics' rating of 4.9 out of 10 from 86 reviews places it slightly below those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- At the beginning of the film, a short clip from Peter Collinson’s action film “The Italian Job” (1969), starring Michael Caine, was inserted. It shows Chinese gold being unloaded from a plane at Turin Airport. The shot of Caine at the end of the film is also borrowed from the 1969 action film.
- Several months after the events depicted in the film, following an active press campaign that blamed the company for using long-outdated computers and security systems, Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company went bankrupt.
- The film is based on real events. In April 2015, a bank in central London was indeed robbed, and the robbers were pensioners and people of pre-retirement age. The robbery unfolded according to the scheme depicted in the film. The criminals stole valuables from safety deposit boxes worth between £14 and £25 million (the exact amount is unknown, as safety deposit box renters do not always disclose what they keep in the bank). However, the joy of the successful robbery was short-lived. Within a few weeks, all the criminals were apprehended – thanks to modern investigative methods and mistakes the robbers made during the robbery.
- At the end of the film, a shot is shown of a young Ray Winstone (here he played Danny Jones) in Alan Clarke's crime drama "Scum" (1979).
- At one point, Danny Jones, played by Ray Winstone, is reading a book called “Computer Forensics for Dummies.” A book with that title was actually found during a search of Jones’s home.
- Ray Winstone played Danny Jones in this film, with whom he once went to school.
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