Film: 
DVD: 
Written by Jeff Pope and Terry Winsor
Directed by Terry Winsor
Starring Sean Bean, Trevor Byfield, Larry Lamb
Features:
- Sean Bean biography
- “Daring Heists of the Twentieth Century”
Released by: BFS Video.
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.
My Advice: Rent the Sharpe’s Rifles series instead.
Mickey McAvoy (Bean) leads a small crew of criminals specializing in small holdups, armored cars and the like. But Mickey has big dreams despite the cautions of his friend Jimmy Kimpton (Byfield). The local mafia might not like Mickey going independent and cutting them out of their take of the profits. Still, Mickey wants to be a big player and he’s got a line on an appropriately big job. One of his crew has a brother-in-law that works for the Brinks Mat warehouse at Heathrow Airport and is willing to help the boys break in. The job is going fine until they get to the vaults. Instead of the 2 million pounds in cash, they find over 30 million pounds in gold bullion. They had hit the jackpot. Of course, that’s when everything starts going wrong. Before everything is said and done, Mickey will discover the truth about what they say about Fool’s Gold.
[ad#longpost]Even though this movie is based on an actual robbery in 1983, this is still the typical heist flick, so there are no real surprises in the plot. But you don’t watch this kind of movie for the plot anyway, you watch it for the characters and the staging of the heist itself. The heist is brutal and lacks finesse but since this was probably how the actual event went down, there’s no fault there. Bean does a good job portraying a small time hood trying to make the big time and making a complete hash of it. He has great presence and completely takes over and the rest of the cast doesn’t put up much of a fight.
Several of the characters seem superfluous and were only in the movie because they were actually there and had to be put in the story. But they don’t add anything to the story. A made-up character, Jimmy Kimpton, made even less sense. He’s changing his loyalty a lot but there doesn’t seem to be any rhythm or reason to his changes of heart. The whole narrative seems to suffer this confusion. The writers should have cleaned up some of the mess that real life usually is.
One of the two features is a biography and filmography of the star Sean Bean. It’s adequately written, giving a comprehensive overview of his life and career. The other feature is more interesting. The disc provides summaries of some of the most notorious heists in the 20th century from the stealing of the Mona Lisa to the Great Train Robbery. Unfortunately, the descriptions are uneven, some barely getting a paragraph or two. If you’re going to put a feature together, at least keep the quality consistent.
When all is said and done, Sean Bean has been in much better material. If you’re a completist, you could give this a watch. But I say rent one his others instead of Fool’s Gold.
