The Italian Job (2003)

The Italian Job is a 2003 American heist film directed by F. Gary Gray and stars Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Seth Green, Mos Def and Donald Sutherland. It is the American remake of the 1969 British film of the same name, and is about a team of thieves who plan to steal gold from a former associate who double-crossed them. Despite the shared title, the plot and characters of this film differ from those of its source material; Gray described the film as "an homage to the original."
Most of the film was shot on location in Venice and Los Angeles, where canals and streets, respectively, were temporarily shut down during principal photography. Distributed by Paramount Pictures, The Italian Job was theatrically released in the United States on May 30, 2003, and grossed over $176 million worldwide. Critical response was generally positive, with publications highlighting the action sequences. A sequel, The Brazilian Job, has reportedly been in development since 2004, but has yet to be produced as of 2018.
==Plot==
John Bridger, a professional safecracker, has assembled a team to steal $35 million worth of gold bullion from a safe in Venice, held by Italian gangsters who had stolen it weeks earlier. The team includes professional fixer Charlie Croker, computer expert Lyle or "Napster", wheelman Handsome Rob, inside man Steve, and explosives expert Left Ear. The heist is successful, but as they drive towards Austria with the bullion, they are stopped by men loyal to Steve, who had turned on them and takes the bullion for himself. Steve kills John when the latter admonishes him, and Rob drives the van over a bridge into the waters below to protect the others, using air tanks from the heist to stay alive. Steve leaves them for dead.
A year later in Philadelphia, Charlie learns that Steve has resurfaced under a new identity and is laundering the gold through a Ukrainian jeweler named Yevhen to finance his lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles. Charlie gathers the team, and also recruits John's daughter Stella, a skilled private safe expert, offering her the chance to get revenge on Steve for her father's death. They stake out Steve's mansion, and Stella, disguising herself as a cable technician, is able to map out its interior, allowing them to determine the location of Steve's safe containing the remaining bullion. Steve, unaware of Stella's identity, asks Stella to go out on a date with him. Charlie and Stella devise a plan using explosives to blow the safe while Steve is away on his supposed date, using three heavily modified Mini Coopers to transport the gold out of the mansion. Charlie enlists the help of supplier Skinny Pete for the explosives and mechanic Wrench to make the modifications on the cars.
During one of Steve's visits to Yevhen, Yevhen accidentally reveals that he knows about the Venice heist. To cover his tracks, Steve kills Yevhen, whose cousin, Mashkov, the leader of a Ukrainian crime family, traces the information about the gold back to Skinny Pete via Yevhen's ex-employee Vance.
The group embark on the night of the planned heist but discover that Steve's neighbors are having a party. As the explosives would draw attention, they cancel their plan. Stella, still having to meet Steve, inadvertently gives away her identity by using similar phrases to her father. When the team arrives to help protect her, Steve taunts them, saying that he still has the upper hand, but he secretly plans to transport the gold to Mexico City by a private plane from Los Angeles International Airport after transporting it there in an armored car. Napster hears of this through his tap on Steve's phone, and Charlie and his gang make a new plan to steal the gold en route to the airport by hijacking the city's traffic control system to force the armored car to a planned spot where they will execute the heist.
On the day of transport, they are surprised when three armored trucks leave Steve's mansion, but Napster is able to determine which one carries the bullion and manipulates the traffic accordingly. Knowing that Steve is monitoring the transport by helicopter, they get the car to the target spot and then create a diversion as they detonate explosives to drop the part of the road with the car into a subway tunnel below. After opening the truck, they find a different safe from the one that held the gold before. Although she struggles initially, Stella cracks the safe, and they load up the Coopers with the gold, now revealed to amount to $27 million. They race from the subway to the Los Angeles River and through the city, pursued by Steve's henchmen on motorcycles, with Napster creating a green wave to evade traffic. Charlie disables Steve's helicopter by damaging its tail rotor with his car, forcing it to land.
Steve commandeers a Ford Bronco to follow Charlie to Union Station, where the cars are loaded onto a train car with the help of Wrench. Steve bribes Wrench to let him in, but finds Charlie and the others waiting. He brandishes a gun and demands his gold back, but Mashkov arrives with some armed men and disarms him. Charlie explains that he has offered Mashkov part of the gold and Steve in exchange for helping with security protection (it is implied that Skinny Pete put him in touch). Stella punches Steve in the face as revenge. Mashkov then takes him away, implying he intends to torture him for killing Yevhen. The group boards the train as it departs to New Orleans, and celebrate in John's honor. The epilogue shows them all having used their share of the gold for their own desired purposes; Handsome Rob purchases an Aston Martin Vanquish, getting pulled over by a beautiful policewoman, Left Ear buys a mansion in Andalusia with a room for his shoe collection, while Napster buys a powerful stereo capable of blowing a woman's clothes off. Meanwhile, Charlie takes John's advice about finding someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with, and he and Stella travel to Venice together.
==Cast==
*Mark Wahlberg as Charlie Croker, the team's mastermind and thief, who seeks revenge for the murder of his mentor, John Bridger.
*Charlize Theron as Stella Bridger, John's daughter and a safe and vault "technician". She prefers the use of technology to crack safes for the police, unlike her father, who did the whole thing by touch.
*Edward Norton as Steve Frazelli, the "inside man" during the Venice heist who later betrays Charlie, John, Rob, Lyle and "Left Ear", and leaves them for dead.
*Donald Sutherland as John Bridger, Stella's father and safecracker whose methods are "old-fashioned", handled entirely by touch. He is Charlie's longtime partner.
*Jason Statham as Handsome Rob, the team's wheelman and a ladies' man. According to Charlie, he set the record for the world's longest freeway chase and received 110 love letters sent to his jail cell from women who saw him on the news.
*Seth Green as Lyle, the team's computer expert. He claims he is the real inventor of Napster, saying that Shawn Fanning, who was his roommate at Northeastern University back in 1999, stole the idea from him.
*Mos Def as Gilligan "Left Ear", the team's demolition and explosives expert. His name comes from an incident during his childhood when he put too many M-80s in a toilet bowl and lost the hearing in his right ear.
*Franky G as Wrench, a mechanic who Rob contacts to engineer the Minis to carry the gold. He also assists in planting explosives to drop the armored car into the subway, where he serves as the lookout.
*Boris Lee Krutonog as Yevhen, a jewelry store owner with ties to the Ukrainian mob. Hired by Steve to help sell the gold, Steve shoots him after realizing that he knows too much about where the gold came from.
*Aleksander Krupa as Mashkov, a high-ranking member of an L.A. Ukrainian mob family and the cousin of Yevhen. He uses Yevhen's store as a laundering front and also has a front on a local junkyard, and he is also against Steve for murdering Yevhen.
==Production==
===Development===
Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote a draft of a remake of the 1969 British crime comedy The Italian Job which was rejected by Paramount. Screenwriting team Donna and Wayne Powers were subsequently commissioned to write a remake. The duo viewed the original film, which neither had seen before, only once "because [they] wanted to get a sense of what it was about" in regards to its tone. Over the course of two years and through 18 drafts, they developed a screenplay which was described by director F. Gary Gray as "inspired by the original." Gray, Powers and Powers, and executive producer James Dyer identified the most prominent similarities as the trio of Mini Coopers used by the thieves, as well as the titular heist involving the theft of gold bullion. Some sequences of the film were storyboarded and previsualized by Gray before production began.
===Casting===
Gray had been interested in working with Wahlberg since seeing his performance in Boogie Nights (1997). After reading the script for The Italian Job, Gray contacted Wahlberg, who "fell in love with it" after reading it himself. Green was also attracted to the project because of the script. Theron was Gray's first choice for the character of Stella Bridger, and Wahlberg also recommended her for the role. She spent time with a safecracker in preparation for the role. Gray's casting director Sheila Jaffe suggested Statham for the role of getaway driver Handsome Rob, and Gray agreed with her choice. Norton took the role of Steve Frazelli, due to a contractual obligation he had to fulfill. Wahlberg, Theron, and Statham attended special driver's training sessions at Willow Springs International Motorsports Park for nearly a month during pre-production.
===Filming===
Gray and cinematographer Wally Pfister worked together to develop a visual style for the film before production began. They viewed car commercials and magazine photographs, as well as chase sequences from The French Connection (1971), Ronin (1998), and The Bourne Identity (2002) as visual references. Pfister wanted "dark textures and undertones and strong contrast"; he collaborated with production designer Charlie Wood on the color palette, and the two would confer with Gray on their ideas. This was Wally Pfister's first experience using the Super 35 format since Paramount preferred that the film not be shot in the anamorphic format, despite Pfister's wishes to do so. However, Gray still wanted a widescreen aspect ratio, just like the origin, so they chose to shoot the film in Super 35 for a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Once principal photography began, Gray frequently utilized dollies, as well as Steadicams and a Technocrane, to keep the cameras almost constantly moving.
Most of The Italian Job was shot on location, at sites Pfister scouted over 12 weeks during pre-production, but some scenes were filmed on sets. The Venice building where the film's opening heist sequence takes place, the van from which the thieves survey Steve Frazelli's mansion, a hotel room, and the LACMTA Red Line subway tunnel were sets constructed at Downey Studios in California. For the scene in which an armored truck falls through Hollywood Boulevard and into the subway tunnel below, Pfister set up seven cameras to capture the vehicle's ~30 foot (9.1 m) descent. Three hundred cars were used to simulate the traffic jam at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, which was controlled by the production crew for a week. Three of the 32 custom-built Mini Coopers used during principal photography were fitted with electric motors since combustion engines were not allowed in the subway tunnels, where some scenes were shot. Other Mini Coopers were modified to allow for camera placement on and inside the vehicles. The director remarked that "[the Mini Coopers are] part of the cast."
Gray wanted the film to be as realistic as possible; accordingly, the actors did most of their own stunts, and computer-generated imagery was used very sparingly. The second unit, under director Alexander Witt and cinematographer Josh Bleibtreu, filmed establishing shots, the Venice canal chase sequence, and the Los Angeles chase sequence over a period of 40 days. Filming on location posed some challenges. The opening heist sequence in Venice, Italy, was strictly monitored by the local authorities, due to the high speeds the boats were driven at. The frigid temperatures at Passo Fedaia in the Italian Alps created problems during production: "The guns would jam, and if you could imagine not being able to walk 40 feet with a bottle of water without it freezing, those are the conditions we had to work in," Gray remarked. Pedestrians had to be allowed to use the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard between takes. Also, scenes which took place on freeways and city streets were only filmed on weekends.
==Release==
===Box-office performance===
The Italian Job premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 11, 2003, and was theatrically released in the United States on May 30, 2003, along with Finding Nemo and Wrong Turn. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $19,457,944, ranking at #3. Paramount re-released the film on August 29, and by the time its theatrical release closed in November 2003, the film had grossed $106,128,601 in the United States and Canada and $69,941,570 overseas—$176,070,171 worldwide. It was the highest-grossing film produced by Paramount in 2003.
===Critical response===
Based on 183 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, The Italian Job has an overall approval rating of 73%, with a weighted average score of 6.43/10. The site's consensus reads, "Despite some iffy plot elements, The Italian Job succeeds in delivering an entertaining modern take on the original 1969 heist film, thanks to a charismatic cast." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews from mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 68 out of 100 from the 37 reviews it collected, indicating "generally favorable reviews."
Stephanie Zacharek, writing for Salon.com, liked the reinvention of the plot and the style and execution of the action sequences, specifically those involving the trio of Mini Coopers, which she wrote were the stars of the film. BBC reviewer Stella Papamichael gave The Italian Job 4 stars out of 5, and wrote that the "revenge plot adds wallop lacking in the original". Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas praised the opening Venice heist sequence and the characterization of each of the thieves, but felt that the Los Angeles heist sequence was "arguably stretched out a little too long". Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4, writing that the film was "two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle concurred, describing The Italian Job as pure but smart entertainment "plotted and executed with invention and humor". Reviewer James Berardinelli also gave the film 3 stars out of 4, and said that Gray had discovered the right recipe to do a heist movie: "keep things moving, develop a nice rapport between the leads, toss in the occasional surprise, and top with a sprinkling of panache." Variety's Robert Koehler compared The Italian Job to The Score (2001), another "finely tuned heist pic" which also featured Edward Norton in a similar role.
David Denby, writing for The New Yorker, praised Norton's performance, as well as those of Seth Green and Mos Def, and the lack of digital effects in the action sequences. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B− grade, comparing it positively to the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, as well as the 2001 remake of Ocean's Eleven. New York Daily News reviewer Jack Mathews gave The Italian Job 2.5 stars out of 4, writing that the action sequences and plot twists were a "vast improvement" from the original, and that the Los Angeles heist sequence was "clever and preposterous". Mike Clark of USA Today also questioned the probability of the Los Angeles heist sequence and wrote that the film was "a lazy and in-name-only remake", giving it 2 stars out of 4. Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, gave The Italian Job 1 star out of 4, describing the film as "a tricked-out remake of a heist flick that was already flat and formulaic in 1969." Travers enjoyed the comic relief in Green's and Def's characters, and added that Norton's was "[t]he most perversely magnetic performance" outside of the Mini Coopers, but felt that there was a lack of logic in the film.
===Home media===
The Italian Job was released on DVD by Paramount Home Entertainment October 7, 2003, and includes five bonus features on different aspects of the film's production, in addition to six deleted scenes. It was released on HD DVD August 8, 2006 and on Blu-ray Disc October 24, 2006.
===Accolades===
F. Gary Gray won a Film Life Movie Award for Best Director at the 2004 American Black Film Festival. Clay Cullen, Michael Caines, Jean Paul Ruggiero and Mike Massa won an award for Best Specialty Stunt at the 2004 Taurus World Stunt Awards for the boat chase through the canals of Venice. The Italian Job was nominated for the 2003 Saturn Award for Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film, but lost to Kill Bill. In April 2009, IGN named the film's Los Angeles chase sequence one of the top 10 car chases of the 21st Century.
Category:Paramount Pictures films
Category:English-language films
Category:2000s heist films
Category:American films
Category:American heist films
Category:American remakes of British films
Category:Films about automobiles
Category:American films about revenge
Category:2003 action thriller films
Category:Films directed by F. Gary Gray
Category:Films set in the Alps
Category:Films set in California
Category:Films set in Los Angeles
Category:Films set in Venice
Category:Films set in Philadelphia
Category:Films set in Spain
Category:Films shot in Los Angeles
Category:Films shot in Venice
Category:Films scored by John Powell
Category:Films produced by Donald De Line
Category:2:35:1 Aspect Ratio Films
Category:Films starring Mark Wahlberg
Category:Films starring Charlize Theron
Category:Films starring Edward Norton
Category:Films starring Seth Rogen
Category:Films on VHS
Category:Films on DVD