Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Seth Green, Edward Norton and a cameo appearance by Donald Sutherland. Now, if you need more reasons to catch a movie, here is one more, a heist movie. Need I say more about this movie at all, any further words would be unnecessary for you to actually catch this movie at least once. After the Ocean series of movies, The Italian Job remains one of the better heist movies made. In fact, considering the wonderful action sequences shot at Venice and Los Angeles, I might just even put this probably just a notch above the Ocean movies even.


The plot itself deals with how one of the members of a successful Venetian heist goes rogue, and tries to kill the other members of the crew. Unknown to him, the rest of the crew quietly plots its revenge under the able leadership of Charlie (Wahlberg). While the rest of the crew is doing it for the money as well as revenge, Stella (Theron) mostly does it for revenge for the killing of her father. One master planner, one demolition expert, one cyber geek, one wheels guy and one expert lock-picker, how the merry crew plans and extracts their revenge makes up for the main storyline of the movie.


The movie has some amazing action sequences, especially the ones involving the 3 small Mini Coopers. The cars with their distinctive paint patterns, are part of the some of the most memorably action sequences of all time. How the director and the camera crew actually shot these sequences would make the Special Features DVD itself worth a careful watch. Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron share some good onscreen chemistry, while Jason Statham does what he does best, look good and kick some mean butt with an awesome series of action sequences involving cars.


My only grouse with this movie is the character of Edward Norton. For an actor of his calibre, his character could have been written much better. In my opinion, this movie would have looked much better with a stronger, more complicated villain. Norton instead ends up looking quite like a caricature at the end of the movie. Apart from that, a double thumbs up for this movie.


Trailer



Related links

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IMDB link
Box Office Mojo link
Allmovie link
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  1. I enjoyed this movie very much. An explosive guy, a safe-cracker, a computer genius, a wheel-man and a man with a spectacular plan of stealing 35 million without using a gun.

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A couple of reasons why I watched ‘Before the Rains’ were Santosh Sivan, its director and Nandita Das, its lead character. While I am a huge fan of Santosh Sivan’s cinematography in almost all of the movies in which he collaborated with Mani Ratnam (Roja, Iruvar, Dil Se, Raavanan, need I say more), the fact that I had seen quite a few interviews of his and he came across as this amazingly imaginative person who knows how to get the maximum detail in each and every frame of his piqued my interest in him. Santosh Sivan is almost like an university of cinematography and the script that he picked up for this movie lent itself to be filmed extraordinarily beautifully.

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