“A crew of retired crooks pulls off a major heist in London’s jewelry district, but what begins as a nostalgic last hurrah for the group quickly becomes a brutal nightmare when greed overtakes them.” – Official Synopsis
King of Thieves is a recent film released in 2018 that is based off of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit burglary that took place in 2015. The film starts with a scene of Brian Reeder, a well-known British thief, and a woman at dinner. Shortly after, he is visiting her funeral. At the funeral, Brian discusses old times with two other friends. They talk about their younger days of discovering the crime life. Brian mourns the death of his wife and experiences an abundance of loneliness at their home they shared together. Brian Reader decides to plan one last job to keep him occupied during this hard time in his life.
He brings together a group of retired criminals to plan a burglary at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit. Brian’s old friends Kenny, Terry, and Danny. He also recruits Basil, played by Charlie Cox, to deactivate the vault’s alarm system. All of the retired criminals use their life-long crime experiences to plot the biggest burglary in Britain. Basil gives each of them a specific task to make sure the burglary is very planned out and no mistakes will be made. The group manages to escape with nearly 14 million dollars’ worth of stolen jewelry and cash. Police are quickly called to the scene and an investigation takes place to find out who did this. While the investigation is taking place, the members of the group start to argue about how the stolen goods will be shared amongst the entire group. The group discusses during dinner what they should tell the police if they were to be questioned, but little did they know they were being recorded by the FBI
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King of Thieves was a comical British crime film. Brian, Terry, Kenny, and Danny are all in their 60’s and 70’s, so they made lots of jokes about having diabetes, being disabled, and deafness, which is no joke at all. They mainly communicated by insulting one another. They all are ex-cons so they would make jokes insinuating that they weren’t scared of getting caught and going back to prison. The film makes a lot of jokes about aging, rather than the crimes that were taking place so that is how they turned this true story of a burglary into a comedy. I expected a more realistic and serious version of the story of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit burglary, but I understand that the film producers wanted to make this film into a comedy as well.