slight but moderately entertaining caper film

Rating: Null/10 (1 July 2003)

Urbanites who spend half their waking hours stuck in non-stop traffic jams may get a kick out of `The Italian Job,' in which one of the characters finds a way to bring almost the entire metropolitan LA area to a gridlocked standstill.
The film, a remake of a 1969 vehicle starring Michael Caine, is an entertaining caper tale that provides all the elements we expect to find in a film of this sort: the elaborate heists, the high tech gadgetry, the inevitable double crosses and the benevolent thieves who would give Mother Teresa a run for her money in the pure-of-heart sweepstakes. The story begins in Venice, Italy, where a cadre of thieving buddies, under the tutelage of one Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg), pulls off an amazing heist of some gold bars valued at $35 million. But before any of the guys have had a chance to even cash in and enjoy their stake, they are betrayed by one of their own  Steve, played by Edward Norton  who kills their mentor, the beloved John Bridger (Donald Sutherland), and leaves the rest of the gang for dead in a near-frozen river in the snowy Alps. A year later, thawed out and not a little peeved at the turn of events, Charlie and the rest of the crew discover Steve's whereabouts in Los Angeles and plot out an enormously complicated scheme to exact their revenge - more for their slain buddy, of course, than for the gold itself.
The plotting is never really as compelling as it could be, but `The Italian Job' boasts enough finesse and skill in its execution to make the film fun for most of its running time. The biggest flaw in the screenplay is that it doesn't take full advantage of the tension and conflict inherent in the narrative setup. We want to see more confrontation scenes between the `good' thieves and the one `bad' one, but Steve rarely spends any screen time confronting his pursuers. That's why the best scene by far is one that occurs in a restaurant when the antagonists DO actually square off against each other fact to face. The overall lack of interaction between these two forces might have been less noticeable and detrimental had the filmmakers come up with any internecine conflicts among Charlie and the other members of his brigade. Instead, these guys all get along so swimmingly with one another that all we are really able to do is watch the mechanics of the storyline as they play themselves out. The men have no disagreements, no differences of opinion and no conflicts of interest within their happy little group, a defect in the screenplay which robs the film of some of the tension it might otherwise have had.
Still, `The Italian Job' is a smooth, fairly standard, fairly enjoyable little time waster with a few good chases both on land and sea, some deft acting and a smattering of amusing one-liners to keep us from walking out of the theater. That one forgets the movie the minute one leaves the theatre is pretty much par for the course for this genre anyway.