Summer Cinema: ‘The Italian Job’
Every once in a while a movie comes along that is just a delight to watch. The characters, story and filmmaking combine to create a movie that is fun, exciting and makes you root for its characters. “The Italian Job” is one of those films.
It tells the story of a group of thieves including Mark Wahlberg, Seth Green, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Donald Sutherland and Mos Def who steal $35 million in gold bricks from a man in Venice. The group is successful in the heist, but Norton doublecrosses the team, shooting Sutherland, stealing the gold and leaving the others for dead.
A year later, Charlies (Whalberg) recruits Stella (Charlize Theron), Sutherland’s safe-cracking daughter to help the thieves steal the gold back from Norton thus avenging their mentor’s death.
One of the biggest draws in “The Italian Job” is the wonderfully developed characters. Sure this is a heist movie with lots of action, but each character is developed to the point that the audience can identify with each one. There is Napster (Green) who was the real developer of the music sharing software, Handsome Rob (Statham) who can pick up any woman and Left Ear (Def) who lost his hearing in his right ear when he exploded a firecracker in the boys room.
Not only are the characters fully developed, but their interactions with each other are real and true to the personalities the embody. This makes “The Italian Job” a welcome rarity. Most action movies (see Statham’s last film “The Transporter”) are more about the fights and the actions, and leave us with shallow characters we could really care less about.
Now this doesn’t mean that the film skimps in any way on the action. We get a great boat chase through the canals of Venice, and a car chase through the streets (and subway system) of Los Angeles with a trio of minis. And the actors actually did their own driving. Director Gary Gray wanted to be able to film long fluid shots of the chases, which eliminated the use of stunt drivers for a majority of the shots.
The actors in this film had fun making this movie, and it shows in their performances. They are enjoying themselves, and that enjoyment transfers through to the audience. Besides, there is something inherently exciting about a heist film. “Ocean’s 11” was the same way. Whatever the reason, “The Italian Job” is perhaps one of the first summer movies really worth the money to see (excluding “X2” of course).
Grade: A-