Okay, this is going to be my first movie review.
Title : The Italian Job
Year: 2003
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Seth Green, Donald Sutherland, etc...
Genre: Action/Crime
This is one of the coolest movie I've seen, now I really regret not watching it while it was playing on the cinema. I just watched this movie last week on DVD (borowed it from the Wellington City Library).
The first time I heard about this movie was from my younger cousin who is fascinated with race cars, and all he talked about was how cool the new mini-coopers were, and how awesome the car-chase scenes were. I never watched the original version (yeah, i case you didn't know, this is a remake from a movie with the same title made back in 1969), and I'm not a big fan of movies depending heavily on car-chase scenes (since this same cousin also made me watch 2Fast2Furious with him on the cinema, I became doubtful of his movie taste), so I decided I'll just wait until I can catch it on vcd or dvd, or maybe on tv.
That was such a bad call...
It turns out that the car chase scene was only the icing on the cake, the whole movie is not based on it, it turns out to be a really smart movie involving brilliant strategies, and pretty good acting (Seth Green was the perfect choice for Lyle), and since I really like crime action movies (Ocean's Eleven, Mission Impossible (the first one, not the dreadful MI:2) and The Whole Nine Yards are among my favourite titles).
The story of The Italian Job was really interesting for me. The story revolves around a team of robbers lead by John Bridger (Sutherland) and his protege, Charlie Croker (Wahlberg), with their tech expert Lyle (Green), their getaway driver, Handsome Rob (Jason Statham), their demolitionist Left Ear/Lefty (Mos Def), and Steve (Edward Norton, I'm not really sure what was his speciality, because it seems that at the beginning he was only helping Left Ear, but he became more important later in the movie).
The movie started in Venice, then it moved to the top of the European Alps, where a sudden plot twist happened (although it was a bit predictable) and the rest of the movie was set in the US.
Although I have to admit, my cousin was right, the mini-coopers were indeed cool, and the car-chase scene was great (especially if the deleted scenes were included, it'll be more funny). But as I said before, it was just the icing on a cake full of high technology, plot twists, surprises, brilliant strategies employed especially by Croker, and pretty good acting.
Although sometimes there are some obvious plot holes, some characters were poorly developed (especially Steve, whose original role in the gang was never understood by me), and some scenes clearly can only happen in movies, but that does not taint my whole view of the movie.
I actually wanted to discuss the plot even more, but I don't want to spoil the fun for those of you who haven't watched it, so, go ahead and watch it for yourself :)
And If you like "smart" crime movies like Ocean's Eleven, I think you'll like this new version of The Italian Job. (But don't be misled by the title, they only spent the few first minutes of the movie in Italy, the bulk of the movie was set in the States).
I also heard that they're going to make a sequel to it, Italian Job 2. I hope it won't suffer from the "Sequel Syndrome", hopefully it'll do even better since now they won't need to make similarities to the original one and therefore can develop the script more freely, but honestly I really doubt that... Well, one can always hope, right?
I hope you enjoyed my first try on reviewing a movie.
Later!!!