Nice Mo Ed.

Several of Hollywood’s B List team up for a film so carefully calculated and purpose built for profit that a gold-digging young actress might have tried to marry it.

Pre-The Departed Mark Wahlberg, pre-Monster Charlize Theron and pre-leading man Jason Statham, backed by ‘always B-List’ Mos Def and Seth Green, to join ‘contractually obligated’ and reluctantly sleepwalking Ed Norton in this painfully obvious attempt at a slick Hollywood heist flick that is so lightweight that it would vanish with a gust of wind.

That doesn’t make it terrible though, just eminently forgettable.

Charlie (Wahlberg), Steve (Norton), Left Ear (Mos Def), Lyle (Green) and John (Donald Sutherland are the friendliest team of master thieves you could ever hope to meet, they speak nothing but carefully relaxed glib Hollywood penned nonsense and share a familiarity that can only be attained by the truly contrived.

After an intricately choreographed – and insanely unlikely – heist involving an unnecessary high speed boat chase through canals, featuring enough stunts to fill an A Team episode, the gang find themselves enormously wealthy beyond any rational person’s wildest dreams. (Enough so that even Mike Tyson wouldn’t be able to blow it all… for a few years at least, entourages ain’t cheap.)

Unfortunately Steve doesn’t think so, and before the man-hugs and back slaps are finished he double-crosses the team and leaves them all for dead.

Just… yum.

The only one that ends up that way though is the senior member of the team John, the team leader Charlie’s mentor and quite the father figure, though not as much a father figure as he was to Stella (Charlize Theron), his estranged but loving daughter back in the US.

Stella is ever so cool. She works as a safe cracking expert, but only so that the safe builders can make them more secure in future of course. And she drives her hotted up product placement – I mean Mini – ever so recklessly yet expertly at intense pace through congested traffic. We can admire her because she didn’t run anyone over… yet. (And because she is insanely hot.)

Stella takes the news of her father’s demise badly – as you might expect.

1 year later.

The crew manage to locate Steve and decide the ultimate act of revenge would be taking their gold back. I would think killing him would work too but that wouldn’t be ‘Hollywood’ enough. The problem is that they have all the requisite experts in place, but no safe-cracker!

Where to turn???

Right so with Stella now on board all that is left is to ‘plan it and do it’, making sure everyone gets to use their skillz (apparently for Statham that begins and ends with being ruggedly handsome), everyone gets their ‘key moment’, and they take more unnecessary steps to garner cool points.

And you’re damn right there’s a Mini chase in the film!

I’ll leave it there and will leave any reference to the clichés alone… OK just one: name another film where characters are underwater wearing diving suits and take the time to wipe their brow???

… Neither can I.

Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. The Italian Job is fairly entertaining yet totally vacuous, it is so manufactured that I kept expecting to see “Made in China” on the character’s backs when they turned.