The Italian Job
November 2003 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Heist movies have always been a favorite with filmmakers, and the genre has inspired some of the very best movies in cinematic history. Topkapi, Rififi, Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Bob le Flambeur immediately come to mind as timeless classics. Recent years have produced The Score and David Mamet’s brilliant Heist, which are good additions to the list.

Faced with all that genius and originality, the producers of The Italian Job have chosen to remake a 1969 movie of the same name, casting the remake king, Mark Wahlberg, and the soon-to-be remake queen (three strikes and she’ll be out) Charlize Theron, adding in Edward Norton (whose promising career seems to be spiraling downward) as a thoroughly nasty villain, far removed from the erudite bad guy that Noël Coward played in the original movie. In fact, the charm of the first movie is replaced with a frantic, smart-aleck attitude that bears little resemblance to the first movie at all. Yet, with all its faults, The Italian Job is slick in construction. It looks good, sounds good, and keeps moving. Those who have never seen any of the films I mentioned in the first paragraph might actually find it quite good, and others will certainly find it easy to take, even if also easily forgotten.

The DVD is very well produced. The 2.35:1 image is amazingly sharp. The opening scenes in Venice, which find Donald Sutherland revisiting the city that started his career in 1973’s Don’t Look Now, are astonishingly detailed. The sound design is punchy without overusing foley, and good surround techniques are used both to highlight action and create ambience. The extras are of the self-serving school; they promote the movie as if it was a masterpiece. The deleted scenes, for instance, surely should have been deleted. There seems to be no real reason that anyone would want to see them.

Concurrent with the release of the 2003 remake, Paramount has also served up a spiffy-looking DVD of the original movie, starring a very young Michael Caine and the aforementioned icon, Noël Coward. Though flawed, this movie is surely the better one, with stunts that were quite advanced for the late '60s and literally a cliffhanger ending, which the scriptwriter for the remake wisely chose to avoid. Leave it to The Big Bus to satirize it.

The video transfer for the 1969 film is fresh and bright; it looks minted yesterday, and the 5.1 remix is excellent. If you do not like such tampering, the original mono track has been restored and sounds quite good in its own right, offering viewers an interesting choice. What amazed me most, however, were the extras on this disc, which include a commentary by Michael Deeley, the movie’s producer, and Matthew Field, author of The Making of the Italian Job. There is also over an hour of new documentary footage discussing the movie with its tempestuous director, Peter Collinson, and its stars.

But in both movies, the real stars are the three little Mini Cooper autos that are used for the heist. In both movies they are so cleverly filmed -- zipping in and out of traffic, dashing through tunnels, and bouncing down stairways -- that they seem to take on their own personas, much like robot figures in space operas like Star Wars. One of the extras on the DVD of the original film is a ballet sequence for the three little cars as they face off against police cruisers in an arena where an orchestra is playing the Blue Danube Waltz! If there were an Academy Award for best performance by a Mini, this plot would have won it in both 1969 and 2003. If it were my money, I would avoid buying this title and use the extra money to rent both.

• Go Back