The Thieves is an effective heist film that, ironically enough, would have been better served by a judicious trimming of its star-studded cast. Ostensibly based around a ten person strong team of thieves, conmen, gangsters and ne`er` do wells that are out to steal a rare diamond called the `Tear of the Sun`, the film essentially boils down to a revenge flick involving half that number in the latter half of the film.
The emotional crux of the film is a hardened robber named Macao Park (Kim Yoon-Seok), a man who has a pretty patchy history with the current leader of his team of bandits, Popeye (Lee Jung-jae), and team member Pepsi (Kim Hye-soo). We aren`t spoiling the details for you, but suffice to say that the rest of the subplots – like the love affair between Simon Yam`s veteran gangster and Kim Hae-sook`s alcoholic conwoman – fall by the wayside by the middle of the movie.
The fact that The Thieves tried so hard to balance such an immense cast makes the first half of the film exceedingly tedious, with lots of exposition setting up the characters` motives and backgrounds. Granted, there`s a satisfying payoff at the end, but one can`t help but feel that the film would have been stronger if it had stuck with developing a half-dozen central characters, rather than the veritable army that it has.
Thankfully, there are some balls-to-the-walls fight scenes in the latter half of The Thieves, particularly a bit of vertical choreography that resembles last year`s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. There`s also a tense heist sequence, and even revelations about certain characters that may make you change your original perception of them. To get to the good bits though, audiences will have to sit through a first half that`s unlikely to steal their imagination.
Summary: It may not be a masterpiece, but at least it ain`t a forgery
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Raphael Lim