London Heist DVD Review

• Actors: Craig Fairbrass, James Cosmo, Mem Ferda
• Director: Mark McQueen
• Disc Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Dubbed: English
• Region: Region 1
• Rated: R
• Studio: LIONSGATE
• DVD Release Date: July 11, 2017
• Run Time: 95 minutes

        London Heist is a crime film directed by Mark McQueen, who is best known for his work on numerous British reality TV series, and co-written by Craig Fairbrass, who has written himself the leading role in this forgettable vanity project. Previously titled Gunned Down, London Heist has a plot as generic as each of its titles. There are heists, betrayals, shootouts, corrupt cops, and all of the other trappings of the genre, though none of the elements are elevated enough to make this film anything but forgettable. The right actor in the lead role may have had the ability to save the movie from feeling so generic, but Fairbrass was not this actor.

        As many crime movies of this type are prone to do, London Heist begins with an armed robbery followed by a celebration in a seedy strip club. Jack Cregan (Fairbrass) and his crew of elderly thieves rob a money depot in London, only to find themselves being hunted down by assassins from a rival gang shortly afterwards. Cregan’s father is the first to be killed, and he spends much of the remainder of the film trying to figure out why, all while additional men try and hunt him down also. At the same time, Cregan is being investigated by a corrupt cop willing to do anything to take the criminal down. And of course he gets his chance when Cregan and his gang are blackmailed into carrying out one more heist, which inevitably goes poorly.

        I would feel bad about spoiling elements of the film, but each twist and turn feels so generically predictable that I can’t imagine many won’t see it coming anyway. These tropes are only briefly abandoned for a mild soap opera twist involving the characters, which loses much of the impact in its melodrama due to the fact that the screenplay never allows us to care enough about the characters for it to matter. The entire film is fairly competently made, but feels entirely inconsequential just the same. Ultimately, London Heist just feels like a low budget version of countless other mediocre crime films.

        The DVD has no special features.  

Entertainment Value: 3.5/10

Quality of Filmmaking: 4/10

Historical Significance:  1/10

Special Features: 0/10