AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Matho The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Robert J. Maxwell This isn't the one with Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and the inimitable Leslie-Anne Down. It's the story of a gang of thieves who robbed a train in the early 1960s and made of with about 2.3 million pounds, worth about 11 million in today's money. It was made for television by the Brits, who do this sort of thing very well, while nobody in the US bothers to try -- with the possible exception of HBO.I won't go into detail about the plot. When it comes to stopping a train, moving it again, uncoupling cars, and changing green lights to amber, the dozen or so gang members are a lot of nudniks. During a practice run, and having read a child's book on driving a train, they manage to start the locomotive and actually get it moving forward. But they don't know how to slow it down, let alone stop it, and they bail out while the mammoth diesel sails off into the night.It gets more serious and far more tense later, when they execute the elaborate plan. Luke Evans, sporting a tremendous development of latissimus dorsi, struts around giving orders. It's a risky business, of course, but one million pounds is a lot of money. A few bungles here and there, and the Bobbies are closing in on them. They separate and begin to hightail it out of London. End of Part One. Part Two gives us the police side of things.If you like the musical score, buy two Miles Davis albums -- "Kind of Blue" and "Porgy and Bess."

Tribble 76 (Kray_Kray) Put me down for another Yank who ranks it a solid 7 I thought the three hours were tightly edited with no wasted scenes. What critical info, if any, was left out I do not know, as I watched this as a preliminary to reading about the robbery. Altho I can't comment on the period detail to the extent other posters here have ("the license plate serials actually didn't change til six month later" - WOW), I think the setting, styles, and lingo were all of a piece with other 60's London films and recreations.So I enjoyed this quite a bit, including the levity - self-proclaimed "wanker boss", "key up me jacksie", Butler's smile on Thursday mornings, etc, which "offset Broadbent's stern gravity and Evans's Jon Hamm like 60's charm offensive.I especially liked the portrayal of the Butler-Williams relationship and how despite Butler's fears his underling would give more away to his "snouts" than he got, Williams' contacts did lead to at least some grassing.The final Heat-style "confrontation" with Reynolds claiming a "victimless" crime leading to such enormous sentences (yet, he was out in nine) would lead to the much greater use of guns in robberies seemed egregiously revisionist, but I suppose among the many contributing factors to that sad development was the sentencing in this case. Goody apparently was straight out framed (Paul Anderson in another wonderful performance.) Certainly in hindsight a crime committed by 15 men with at least half a dozen accomplices and netting so much cash was fated to go bust. But that Butler had to delay retirement for so long was a testimony not just to his vocation, but also to the robbers' use of that critical "luck" factor. The fact Butler left a mess for Nipper Read and had allowed Williams to go way too far off the reservation is subject matter for other films.Still, film has to make an emotional as well as an informational mark, and I'm left wanting to chalk this one up for the bad boys. Mix south London and Brighton firms and you apparently got a very lively lot. "Dreaming big", and establishing the same bond of camaraderie the Flying Squad unit did evidently trumped even the millions. Or so this engrossing film would have us believe.

vitabrevis-219-530758 Part One was mildly interesting. One is always curious to learn how a particularly complicated operation is carried out. As to the solving of the crime in Part Two, I was expecting Tommy Butler to be a detective. He wasn't. He was basically a dour, obsessive project manager who had little or no special insight into who the perps might be. He simply put together a team of men who had a lot of connections in the underworld plus one competent forensic expert, and flogged them until they brought him the names of the gang members. Then Butler would drive somewhere in his special car, arrest the unlucky chump and remove one more photo from the board. I suppose that's how the investigation was in fact carried out, but there was something unsatisfying about the whole episode. Strip out the period clothing, cars and music and what you're left with is a fairly bland and uninteresting narrative.

Paul Grant Firstly I will state that I enjoyed both parts of this and thought it was a good way of covering a story that has become somewhat of a folk legend. It didn't make heroes out of either the robbers or the cops, which makes a pleasant change. It did show the violence they used against driver Jack Mills and why Butler of the Yard hung doggedly on till he got his men. So after all that good stuff why do they still make silly errors that distract the viewer? One that really jarred with me (OK I'm a geeky engineer) was the UHF TV aerial on the farmhouse. UHF didn't start in UK till 1964/5. The frame less glass doors in the police station are also horribly out of era for 1963! The wrong series Land Rover (wing mounted lights came in 1969). The white Jaguar police car with a sunroof! And the railway scenes were very poor, wrong loco, wrong location, wrong track(s) (Did anyone else notice how the West Coast mainline was variously single and double track with no overhead electrification? And also with extremely sharp bends!) Obviously it had to be filmed on a preserved railway line, but it would have helped if they had used CGI and/or some scenic realism. That bridge location is an iconic 20th century image and to use a bridge that was so different is poor, perhaps the BBC should pay more attention to detail and less to senior execs!