Hatton Garden

A great script and memorable acting from Timothy Spall and David Hayman playing men who know it's madness but just have to steal big - it's what they do.

British mini-serieses about true stories are almost always worth to watch. This is certainly one of them. There is not much to spoil since this is a true story and everyone who googles for the title will get the whole story. This mini-series is more than well done. The cast is on point, the story well told. Good entertainment too. I watched the movie "King of thieves" only two weeks ago and I thought it was very boring but this mini-series is so much better. Just watch it ;-)

Delayed from transmission for two years due to legal complications, this four-part dramatisation of the Hatton Gardens heist which according to different reports cleared between £14,000,000 to a mind-boggling £200,000,000, the events depicted, from what I've read up in the background, appear accurate and true to life.

Carried out at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit location in London's "Diamond District" over the Bank Holiday Weekend in May 2015 by a gang of elderly career criminals dubbed the "diamond wheezers" by the press, doing "one last job" the series concentrated more on the planning and carrying out of the robbery than the police operation which eventually caught the gang and brought them to justice.

There were bound to be few surprises in the cast with familiar faces from the old-boys network like Timothy Spall, Kenneth Cranham, Alex Norton and David Hayman to the fore and even if some of the broad Cockney accents were tricky to decipher, there's little doubt that the production here played it straight and scored points by deviating little from the well-known facts of the case, right down to the painstaking recreation of the actual underground crime scene itself.

The robbery itself was no Topkapi piece of silent, smoothly executed theatre. It was loud, messy and at times chaotic, with the initial six-strong gang having to abandon the operation on the first night due to their being unable to clear away nailed-down cabinets blocking entry, two members including the planner and ringleader Brian, played by Cranham, quitting the enterprise rather than go back the second night to try again and almost unbelievably, new boss Timothy Spall's Terry character keeling over with a diabetic episode mid-job.

And yet they somehow pulled it off, but squabbling over "divvying-up" the proceeds, especially when Brian comes back around sniffing for a share of the loot, saw the gang make the elementary mistake of not lying low for a time before being stung by a police operation which eventually netted the lot of them, including the elusive sixth man Basil, if not anywhere like the whole proceeds of the crime.

With such a reliable cast, respect for the source material and a commendable lack of sensationalism, it all made for strong viewing, even if the outcome was never in doubt. I particularly appreciated the invention of a composite character to stand in for the affected victims of this so-called "victimless" crime and the way his honesty and humility ultimately shamed the perpetrators own naked greed. I might quibble about some of the P.C. casting decisions with some of the peripheral characters and didn't like the loud guitar music used in the background, but with the experienced Spall and Cranham in particularly good form, this unglamorous depiction of this headline case ultimately proved worth the wait from production to transmission.

An audacious group of retired thieves and robbers unite to pull off a huge heist during The Easter weekend of 2015.

It's a very well made, very well acted series. I imagine bits of it were dramatised, but having read up extensively about it, they seemed to stick to the core.

If I'm honest, I think parts one and two drag a little, they could really have condensed them into one, parts three and four however are excellent. It gets better and better as it progresses.

Part four reveals the tensions and rivalries that exist, the term about thieves falling out had never been more true, you'll wonder if they'd have been a little wiser, and less greedy, it they'd have gotten away with it.

Timothy Spall and Kenneth Cranham stand out for me, but the whole cast are excellent.

8/10.

The most we had any right to expect from "Hatton Garden" was a fairly accurate reconstruction of the crime and yet another addition to that long line of British gangster pictures and TV shows. What we got instead was one of the all-time great heist pictures, be that on television or in the cinema, and a masterclass in great acting, helped along by Paul Whittington's superb direction and a brilliant screenplay from Jeff Pope and Terry Winsor.

Spread over four nights it told the story of the 2015 Easter Weekend Hatton Garden robbery and its immediate aftermath. The first two nights concentrated solely on the robbery, filmed with a documentary=like precision and up there with the very best of them. The subsequent two nights showed how the police finally caught up with these, not-very-bright, geriatric robbers.

As the thieves who couldn't agree on anything, (it's amazing they were able to pull the job off in the first place and they very nearly didn't), Timothy Spall, Kenneth Cranham, David Hayman, Brian F. O'Byrne, Geoff Bell and Alex Norton were absolutely terrific with Spall and Cranham taking the lion's share of the honors. This wasn't just a bunch of fine British actors playing at being stock criminals but beautifully fleshed-out portrayals of living, breathing ordinary individuals and the real pleasure of "Hatton Garden" was watching great actors act. Yes, it was also a hugely entertaining crime caper, all the better for being based on fact, exciting and often very funny but it was so much more; proof that television can sometimes leave the current cinema trailing in its wake.