Inert heist and an inert Nick Nolte

THE GOOD THIEF (2002)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"The Good Thief" has all the elements for a superbly stylish, character-driven
Neil Jordan flick. It's got Nick Nolte, a jazzy score and beautiful Parisian
locations. It's got the right mood and the atmosphere of a noir/heist picture.
What it doesn't have is soul, the key ingredient to many of Jordan's films.

Nolte plays Bob, a retired burglar who has his own house and plays at the
roulette tables whenever he is bored. He is also something of a heroin addict
and his tired eyes indicate a man who has lived too much and needs to settle
down. He rescues a 17-year-old Russian prostitute (Nutsa Kukhiani) from having
to further degrade herself, but he is unsure what to do with her (she is a
heroin user as well). After undergoing detox treatment (which he recovers from
rather quickly), Bob takes on one last heist involving priceless art from a
casino in Monte Carlo. Of course, everyone assumes that Bob is going to rob the
casino of its money, or is he? Meanwhile, Bob has to elude Roger (Tcheky
Karyo), a relentless detective who knows Bob is up to his old games thanks to a
snitch.

"The Good Thief" has a promising start yet the rest of the movie is the
equivalent of a run-down automobile - it spurts and starts and then dies down.
One can assume that Bob is the focus of the story but there are so many
tangents that nothing becomes clear as to whom we should or shouldn't care
about. The drowsy prostitute is introduced as a heavy heroin user and, later,
she is a made-up, pristine-looking woman accompanying Bob to the casino -
Kukhiani would look at home in a James Bond flick. There are also secondary
characters who exist merely as backdrop scenery - one of them is responsible
for a murder that is treated so matter-of-factly that I barely cared myself.
And when Ralph Fiennes appears as an art broker, we catch a glimmer of
liveliness and playfulness that is sinfully missing from the rest of the movie.
A shame that Fiennes appears in only two scenes.

Writer-director Jordan does show flashes of human interest in Bob but it is
largely an underwritten role. Only Nick Nolte, the king of mentally exhausted
antiheroes, gives the character some measure of gravity. In the end, we are
never sure what to think of Bob or any character or the big heist. We see the
teen prostitute's former pimp and other guys hanging around Bob, including an
alarms expert, not to mention a couple of twins and, oh, there is the snitch.
But the movie never invests much time in any of these characters.
Scenes have no shape or fluidity - sometimes Jordan and his editor, Tony
Lawson, inject a freeze-frame at the end of almost every sequence. I am a
sucker for making editing obvious if it has thematic or character-related
relevance - here, it just seems inappropriate and distracting. 

From the same man who brought us the wonderful human dramas that were 

"Mona Lisa" and "The Crying Game," this movie is so antiseptic, it needs 

a shot of adrenaline. There are two things to enjoy in "The Good Thief" - Nick

 Nolte and the moody photography. Nolte is at the top of his game and works 

wonders with his limited role - he just brings it alive in ways perhaps unintended 

(okay, his trademark near-mumble helps). As for director Neil Jordan, he certainly

 knows how to make a movie. There is enough flash in the noirish shadows and 

excellent camerawork (including one strangely canted angle) for ten movies. But 

it really is all flash and no style - the substance isn't there to support anything on the
screen. It is like watching the most inert heist film ever made - it looks
great but it is meaningless.