Army of Thieves review: Netflix heist caper does just enough
A spin-off from a popular Netflix movie, the heist caper’s great strength also exposed its most glaring weakness.
One of the big questions in Army of Thieves is whether one character’s charm is enough to carry a whole movie.
Mattias Schweighofer’s master safe cracker Dieter was undoubtedly one of the highlights of Zack Snyder’s zombie movie Army of the Dead. His guileless wit and charisma made him easy to back and a prime candidate for his own spin-off.
That spin-off is Army of Thieves, which shifts genres as a heist caper and occasional romantic drama, and the zombies only show up in nightmares and blurry news footage.
It’s a likeable, generally pacey movie with some energetic action sequences (a chase through Prague borders on exciting) but its strength also exposes its greatest weakness. Because Schweighofer’s character is so dynamic and affable, it’s really obvious when everyone else isn’t.
Set six years before Dieter followed the pack into Las Vegas, he was a bank teller in Potsdam, living a mundane life with little change in routine. His name back then was Sebastian.
Since he was a child, Sebastian has been obsessed with fictional safe designer Hans Wagner, whose master works were four puzzles inspired by the non-fictional composer Richard Wagner and his Ring Cycle operas.
The four safes were named after them – Rheingold, Walkurie, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. The Gotterdammerung is the safe Sebastian is destined to crack in Army of the Dead so let’s take that off the table for now.
When Sebastian makes a YouTube video explaining his love of Wagner’s legendary safes – doubling as an exposition dump for the audience – he comes to the attention of Gwendoline (Nathalie Emmanuel), a thief extraordinaire.
She recruits him into her gang of international bank robbers with the promise of three heists, each exacted against a Wagner safe. Sebastian doesn’t care about the money, for him, it’s the irresistible allure of the challenge – and maybe also the irresistible allure of Gwendoline.
As far as the plotting goes, Army of Thieves, directed by Schweighofer and written by Snyder and Shay Hatten, is perfectly serviceable as a heist caper, and occasionally as a romantic drama.
But beyond Sebastian and maybe Gwendoline, the charaterisations for the rest of the crew – hacker Korina (Ruby O. Fee), getaway driver Rolph (Guz Khan) and muscle Brad Cage (Stuart Martin) – are so thin and fleeting they may as well not be there.
Then there’s the Interpol team chasing them, led by a vindictive agent, Delacroix (Jonathan Cohen), who was shot in the butt by the gang during an earlier scrape. Delacroix is at a 17 when everyone else is at an eight.
At every point, that character feels like he’s in a different movie – think Will Ferrell if he was cast as a villain in a sixth Spy Kids sequel.
Despite those frustrations, Army of Thieves is a breezy enough, charming enough and diverting enough heist caper that gives you more of Schweighofer’s lovable safe cracker – and that’s about enough. But only just.
Rating: 3/5
Army of Thieves is on Netflix
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