Thick as Thieves (2009)

Thick as Thieves arrives with the quiet dignity of a film released direct-to-DVD in the United States and then held back eighteen months before reaching German theaters, as though the Germans needed time to prepare. Mimi Leder directs with the efficiency of a competent professional handed a script about two thieves, a Fabergé egg, and a Russian mobster with a grudge. Morgan Freeman plays the veteran. Antonio Banderas plays the younger crook. There is a vault, a betrayal, and then a second betrayal wearing the first one's hat. The whole apparatus clicks along without generating heat, and a seventeen percent approval rating feels less like a verdict than a formality.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a vacuum in a nice suit. Freeman and Banderas at the top of the call sheet lend an international texture, which reads as a mild representational gesture the film seems unaware of having made. The casting is star casting, nothing more. Radha Mitchell's Alexandra exists to be kidnapped and to confess her feelings, a workload no character deserves. The screenplay has no interest in race, gender, class, the environment, or the inner lives of anyone not currently opening a safe. The villains are Russian because Russians are convenient. The museum is corrupt because museums in heist films are always corrupt. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The film has no thesis to deliver, which is its one genuine mercy.

A heist film that respects the formal requirements of the heist film and nothing else. Leder keeps the camera where it belongs, and the plot moves from con to counter-con with the grim punctuality of a commuter train. Tom Hardy appears briefly, presumably on his way to better things. The final twist lands with the soft thud of a door closing in an empty house. We have a specimen of pure entertainment, unburdened by message and at peace with its own modest ambitions. There is something almost restful in it. Almost.