By Jim Broadbent is a lovely, lovely man. That’s something we can all agree on. Gentleman Jim. Kind, affable, charming Jim. Aw, Jim. Lovely, lovely Jim and his big trustworthy CAMRA treasurer’s face.
He has another side, though: Evil Jim Broadbent is, by some distance, the best thing about King of Thieves, the slightly lightweight telling of the Hatton Garden robbery (in short: old lags try one last massive job, nearly get away with it, then don’t) which doubles as a heavyweight battle royale between the Grand Old Men Of British Acting.
Sure, Sir Michael Caine gets right into all his late-career modes – especially I’m Not Angry I’m Just Disappointed And Sad And Cockney, and the lesser-spotted, hackles-raised I Will Fucking Cut You, You Little Shit – while Sir Tom Courtenay dodders, ducks, dives and deceives. Sir Michael Gambon pisses in a sink. Evil Jim, though, is legitimately terrifying.
The plot mostly follows Caine, playing gold specialist and criminal ringleader Brian Reader. After his wife’s funeral, he shuffles round his empty house in a dressing gown, pouring endless whiskies. But then a gang of old criminal acquaintances – menacing, unstable Terry Perkins (Broadbent), exuberant Danny Jones (Ray Winstone), hapless Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse) and posh boffin ‘Basil’ (Charlie Cox) – try to haul him out of his grief and back into his old ways.
It pulls your classic Brit heist caper moves in the first half - a bit too hard, a bit too often - and it makes clear that it’s in love with the romance of the roguish wrong ‘un and the crook with the skills and the stones to give the Old Bill the slip. Ray Winstone does a handstand at one point, which is a highlight. The laughs are gentle and the thrills gentler still.
The second half is where it gets more interesting. It’s full of ugly, petty, venal, grasping power plays, with allegiances constantly shifting as the walls close in and this entire galleon of loose cannons starts going off. That’s when the cast really get a chance to spit at each other (Caine: “I will get what is due to me if it FUCKING KILLS ME”; Courtenay: “You treacherous slags”), each a mixture of vulnerable and vicious.
Broadbent, though, gives himself up to Evil Jim. He appeared in flashes in The Damned United, Hot Fuzz and Little Voice, but in King of Thieves, once he decides Caine has “lost his arsehole” and needs to be deposed, he completely overwhelms Lovely Jim, and Broadbent turns into a swivel-eyed, bigoted bully.
It’s such a complete and unsettling transformation that Evil Jim really needs his own vehicle, his Sexy Beast or Harry Brown. Fortunately, it sounds like a position’s opened up recently. Bond 25 has lost its director in Danny Boyle and the casting of its villain has turned into an ordeal. Will it be Said Taghmaoui? Will it be Tomasz Kot? Here’s a compromise: Evil Jim Broadbent.
Imagine Evil Jim as a gangland enforcer who ends up being yet another link in SPECTRE’s malevolent web, or a hard-arse Foreign Minister who doesn’t approve of Bond’s methods and turns out to be a Russian plant, or an oil magnate who wants to blow up the sun. At any rate, with the way everything is at the minute it feels like the right time to have another British Bond villain. The last was Toby Stephens as Gustav Graves in Die Another Day, and, as you might recall, he was actually a North Korean colonel with a facelift. In a roundabout way, a British Bond villain would make the same point as King of Thieves does: that more often than not, we’re our own worst enemies.
