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In an ocean teeming with hotties, dimwits, clever teenagers, and wild parties, US-made cinema offers (and dishes out) a rich catalog of action films: particularly, wild races dominate as they chase some mystery hidden in the dark suburbs of the big East-West Coast cities.
Faithfully following the yankee model of suspense on two/four wheels, "The Italian Job" (a remake of the film with the same name released in 1969) mixes engines and the finest and most ingenious technology, both at the service of one of the world's oldest (and most profitable) professions: theft. Here, however, we are not facing shabby small-time crooks dealing with crowbars and switchblades: the heist turns into a refined work of art, organized, studied, and conceived down to the smallest details, from the most irrelevant geographic coordinate of the vault to the nanosecond useful for the escape: there's the computer wizard, the coordinating strategist, the professional explosives expert, as well as the safe expert. A team that any major corporation would dream of, if not for the actual purpose of their extraordinary skills.
The plot, in itself, doesn't appear very intricate: a close-knit team of ace thieves, led by the old John Bridger, manages to seize a safe full of gold bars in Venice. Fleeing toward the Alps, one of the members (Steve Frazelli) betrays the crew and takes off with the loot, not before cruelly murdering the boss Bridger. Intent on punishing the murderer - conman, Charlie Croker, Lyle "The Real Napster," "Left Ear," and "Handsome" Rob reassemble the group a year after the dastardly act, also involving Stella Bridger (Charlize Theron), the murdered man's daughter and a savvy safe expert. With the collaboration of additional minds for the perfect heist, our fearless Diaboliks invent an infallible plan (mostly the corrected and updated version of the Venetian counterpart) to reclaim the stolen gold and punish Steve, who, meanwhile, is living in luxury in Los Angeles under various false identities.
The lack of a complex plot is immediately filled by the sketches dedicated to the individual modes of thievery: the "Italian job" is painted as an intricate and astonishing deployment of tricks, stratagems, machinations, reflections, and analyses that border on the scientific and empirical: through a clever "division of labor," the team ensures maximum efficiency and productivity; sociologically speaking, it's teamwork that allows the final victory even for the most detrimental of intents, a sort of Disney-like "one for all - all for one" that the American camera recycles, even banally, at various points.
Every single stealth move is subjected to the most severe and meticulous examination: on one side, the three Mini Coopers which, having confirmed their capacity and resilience to the toughest dispatches, speed like crazy through the subway and sidewalks; on the other, the "technical supervisor" (Lyle, called Napster as he considers himself the true inventor of the file-sharing program), the group's hacker who, through his trusty PC, worms his way as a vermin into the rotten apple of all city computer systems, even managing to compromise the normal operation of traffic signals and modify them according to the needs of his fugitive comrades (though disrupting the usual city traffic as well as sending the street surveillance network into a tailspin).
Despite the illegality of the team, which nonetheless considers theft equivalent to a normal job, it is structured around solid rules and internal laws never to be transgressed, under penalty of revenge. Steve's betrayal, even executed with the murder of his old boss, is conceived as the real crime to fight: in the film, the traitor will be defeated and humiliated, though too easily, without any gunfight or strategic errors from the rebellious "heroes." A somewhat "uneventful" conclusion that proves to be the only blemish of a pleasant and intriguing little film, useful to stimulate the little thief in all of us, also because, as Italians, we should be perfect connoisseurs of roaring engines and impeccably organized heists. Isn't it so?
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