Wednesday 1 December 2021

Army Of Thieves (2021) - Movie Review

Well, after our last look at the story of a charming lead teaming up with one of Interpol’s most wanted on a quest for three mythic items in the world of international thievery, let’s see if someone else can do it better. No, this actually wasn’t planned out in advance; this just happens to have a reasonably comparable story to Red Notice. It is also the second step in Zack Snyder’s planned franchise surrounding Army Of The Dead, serving as an origin story for that film’s breakout character Ludwig Dieter. And it turns out to be just the exposure actor Matthias Schweighöfer needed, and not just as a lead actor.

Now taking on the role of producer and director, Schweighöfer has made a name for himself in his home country as a filmmaker with a penchant for off-kilter romance stories, something he maintains with the more romantic tinges delivered here. It’s not a matter of him trying to ape Snyder’s directorial style, or even making anything all that recognisably Americanised. Instead, he sticks to what he’s good at, even bringing on his regular collaborator in DOP Bernhard Jasper, and injects it into the Army Of The Dead’s overall heist-with-zombie-apocalypse-background universe. It’s quite slick in its presentation, and the way it builds on the legendary quality of the vault beneath Las Vegas by showing the other three in the same series helps bulk up the larger story. It also adds a rather unexpected melancholy as it gets into the origin of these vaults and the ultimate fate of their creator.

It also builds on the fantastic character quality of Army Of The Dead, as each member of the main heist crew is nicely fleshed out. Dieter is still as nervously idiosyncratic as ever, Nathalie Emmanuel adds another bombastic action franchise to her repertoire as the linchpin recruiter, Ruby O. Fee makes up for the embarrassment of Polar as the resident hacker, Guz Khan as the wheelman is entertaining, and Stuart Martin as Brad Cage… well, if the name isn’t enough of an indicator, he does marvellously as the team asshole.

Also as indicated by that name, just because this is still Euro to its core doesn’t mean it’s completely detached from American influences. Indeed, most of the characters here are in some way influenced by American pop culture, mainly films and comic books. This feels like what Last Days Of American Crime should have been like, highlighting Hollywood and general American-Western aesthetics while maintaining that Eurocentric perspective behind the camera. It makes for a nice meeting point between Schweighöfer’s direction and Shay Hatten’s script work, the latter of which keeps up his momentum for world-building-heavy action narratives (as shown in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum) in how he builds up the mystique of the heists themselves and even some intertextuality between the main story and that of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

But the most interesting aspect of this whole thing, aside from fulfilling the rom-com/heist idea that Locked Down completely ballsed up, is how it links together with Army Of The Dead’s metanarrative. Where Of The Dead was about genre filmmaking as pure artistic expression, Of Thieves looks at that same idea from the perspective of the audience. This is highlighted mainly by Dieter and Brad, both on opposite ends of the alignment chart but just as influenced by the fiction they’ve absorbed. Brad started out as a bullied little kid but, inspired by the likes of Nicholas Cage, refashioned himself into the ideal of an action movie lead. Whereas Dieter (or Sebastian, as the name he was born with) starts out as a dissatisfied bank clerk and struggling YouTuber, but becomes, and I’m not even kidding about this, a safe-cracking superhero.

The idea being presented here, of using fiction to carve out the ideal version of yourself, is quite fascinating to me, especially considering the similarities between their world and our own. I mean, we are also in the midst of a world-changing viral outbreak that has led most of us to retreat into works of fiction as a means of survival. It charges right into notions of how fiction can influence people and affect how they perceive and interact with the larger world; it’s one of the main reasons why I love superhero fiction especially, where that effect is at its most intentional. And where the scared child Alexis became the meat-headed and vanity-stricken “action hero” Brad Cage, the shy and skittish Sebastian became the romantic hero he envisioned himself to be in those comic books he created as a child: Ludwig Dieter, the man who accomplished what no other safecracker before could ever dream of.

As its own story, even removed from its place in the larger Army Of The Dead continuity, this is a fun and snappy heist flick that’s more focused on being engaging than being cleverer than its audience, a tactic that works out much to the film’s advantage. But when put directly next to Army Of The Dead, the two serve as a quite liberating look at the potential of genre cinema, both for those making it and for those watching it. For those making it, it’s a chance to cut loose from studio-mandated confines and express their true artistic self, whereas those watching it might see traces of the person they most want to be, as refracted through the various magics that we collectively know as ‘filmmaking’.

Given my own history with films like The Big Lebowski, which is basically the blueprint for my entire life philosophy, or how I view filmmaking and art in general as a truly transformative aspect of human culture, or just how I’ve stuck with the Internet persona I created back in high school (even after publishing written works under my legal name), there’s something about this film, on its own and in context to its franchise, that I find very appealing. It’s the last example I needed to see to know, for absolutely certain, that Zack Snyder really is onto something with the moves he’s been making this year, and he’s using that platform to give an under-the-radar German filmmaker his own showcase on the international stage. This is what I was talking about with letting others get the chance that Snyder got with ZSJL, and with how gleefully entertaining it is, it’s a beautiful thing to see.

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