Introduction
The Good Thief was filmed in Monaco and Nice in 2002. It’s a British French crime comedy and follows a heroin and gambling-addicted retired thief as he sets up his last big score, a massive heist of a Monte Carlo Casino. It stars Nick Nolte as Robert Bob Montague, Ryan Phillipe, Gary Oldman and other big-names.
The Main Story
Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief is distinctive amongst heist films as it offers all the right ingredients, namely lust, greed, bad luck and plain stupidity all colliding to ruin a well thought out heist. The film starts with Bob’s (Nick Nolte) ambling around the South of France broke and as high as a kite and slandering the young criminals surrounding his orbit.
That all changes when one of Bob’s crew informs him of a new score: a Monte Carlo Casino with millions worth of the world’s greatest paintings on its walls. However, these are duplicates and the originals are stored in a secure vault in a nearby building.
Bob plans to fool the police into thinking he’s there to rob the casino while he is robbing the building next door. This was back before the internet days of best online casinos australia remember. It was all bricks and mortar. Bob needs to assemble a diverse crew of hackers, safe crackers and diggers to pull this off. The police are keeping a close eye on Bob, and he is aware of that so he decides to play in the casino while his crew tunnel their way into the room.
The Ending
Things begin to fall apart as one of the crew shoots a man, another tells the wrong people too much, and Bob finds himself in massive debt to a vicious fence. Surprisingly not all works out for everyone in the end, and Bob enjoys an unexpected streak of luck at the tables. It’s an uplifting ending, for a heist film.