SPOILER ALERT for a piece of DRECK!!!

Rating: 1/10 (11 September 2005)

This soulless piece of drivel ranks amongst the worst of American excesses. Apart from a very clever opening this film has none of the lightness of touch, ingenuity or charm of the original. In this way the film is a paragon of Hollywood film-making in the 21st century  all beginning, no middle, no end.
Compare this to the less than clever opening of the original, which is ostensibly some guy driving around Turin till he hits the bulldozer planted in a tunnel by a waiting mafia. We the audience have no idea who the man is, or the significance of the whole scene. This flies in the face of what we are now told is good screen writing  firstly, the man in the car is NOT the main character, and secondly we haven't actually established what's going on. We only find out who he is about half an hour into the filmand yet it works, and wow, the whole of the film is really great.
Which begs the question 'is it salient to compare this to the original?' Salience notwithstanding this is a remake, or rather one of those films that both seeks to define itself from the original and separate itself from the original. The original was a caper film, and consequently had the requisite hallmarks of that genre. Things such as wit, clever writing, clever characters, and so on.
This remake is a revenge film - Mark Wahlberg seeks to exact revenge upon Edward Norton because he killed Michael Caine  an act so symbolic it's meaning becomes ironic to the extreme. It says we're killing the original, make way Michael Caine, your day has ended. Unfortunately for the makers of this insipid piece of garbage they spake too soon, because even with the passage of time Collinson's film remains impressive in its wit, style and execution.
I once had a discussion with a film guru about 'From Here To Eternity' in which I asked why if great films aren't about dialogue they're about 'showing', that FHTE remains one of the truly great films of all time. His conclusion, which I think is correct, was that nobody these days has the ability to write films like From Here to Eternity. It's obvious that no-one can make films like the original 'The Italian Job' either.
I took the trouble of hiring out the original, just to see if I had been romancing the past. I hadn't. The original should go down as one of the great British films of all time, the remake will go down in the vast pool of mediocrity that has become American film-making.
Awful. Just awful.