Etretenimiento

The Hatton Garden movies: how the British crime film lost its bottle

ometimes, a film arrives at exactly the right time. In Brexitland 2017, that film is The Hatton Garden Job, a nostalgia-rich and semi-fictional crime caper loosely based on the case also known as the Hatton Garden safe-deposit burglary. The turnaround has been quick. You will remember the Easter weekend two years ago, when parties unknown drilled through 18in of concrete under central London to steal £14m worth of gold, cash and jewellery. And how, when arrests were finally made, the movie pitched itself – the principal gang members aged between 60 and 76, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with a swag bag.

The gift kept giving. The heist involved no violence, granting the story family-friendliness. Then there was “Basil” – the unknown security expert who remains at large with his share of the proceeds, allowing it a hint of sun-kissed escape. Bingo! Or indeed blingo, as in “the biggest blingo blag in history”, the phrase with which the theft is described on screen by Phil Daniels, a fine actor doomed to be remembered by many as the voice of Blur’s Parklife.

This may not be all. Another version of the same events awaits up the pipeline, a high-end affair from producers Working Title to star – of course – Michael Caine, the script adapted from a piece in Vanity Fair. Elsewhere on the industry spectrum, a third movie already exists – Hatton Garden the Heist, from Terry Lee Coker, writer-director of gangland opus Essex Vendetta. The Hatton Garden Job falls somewhere between the two, made of plyboard but with means enough for Daniels to be joined by Larry Lamb as veteran thief Brian Reader. Fancier yet, the police theory that Basil was younger than his associates is used to justify casting actual movie star Matthew Goode, 38, gamely if erratically dropping his Hs.

Goode brings with him not just his fame, but the memory of his role in Downton Abbey, a link with a counter-intuitive logic. Across generations and classes, his new film is as giddy with the past as anything from the quill of Julian Fellowes. This, it reminds us loudly and often, is a tale of the old school – proper chaps in dowdy East End boozers, observant of the criminal code. One scene takes place at West Ham’s deserted Upton Park, abandoned in the club’s move to the Olympic Stadium, for no reason the script elects to mention. In truth, the east London thing is a stretch. Reader came from Dartford in Kent and his colleagues were from Enfield; their meet-ups were held in an Islington gastropub offering craft ales and a brunch menu. You suppose a detail like that might spoil the salute to tradition restored, the kind of criminals they don’t make any more doing the kind of crime they don’t do – in the words of yet another pending British gangster film, We Still Steal the Old Way. With all that the Old Way implies.