Thief Lord (DVD)

...they fall in with the Thief Lord and his kid gang, who live in an abandoned cinema and make their money from stealing to order. But the boys' aunt and uncle won't let them get away so easily. Soon they have a private detective on their trail and a whole heap of trouble brewing when they are asked to nick a wooden wing for a shadowy count.

Cornelia Funke's novel has already sold more than a million copies in the US alone. So you would ...
...excitement of being in the Thief Lord's gang or any of the plentiful emotions felt by the kids. It tries to coast along on the age-old belief that adults simply don't understand kids and that they are the enemy. But the adults are all painted as such basic pantomime villains that they are totally unbelievable. This in turn renders the entire world of the film so unreal that you won't believe the kids need to retreat into a rich fantasy life to escape ... more

Orphans Prosper and Bo run away from their nasty relatives and take refuge in the backstreets of Venice. There they fall in with the Thief Lord and his kid gang, who live in an abandoned cinema and make their money from stealing to order. But the boys' aunt and uncle won't let them get away so easily. Soon they have a private detective on their trail and a whole heap of trouble brewing when they are asked to nick a wooden wing for a shadowy count.

Cornelia Funke's novel has already sold more than a million copies in the US alone. So you would have thought the film companies involved in the production of the film would have spent more money on it. There's obviously a market for it. Sadly the whole movie comes across as a cheap made-for-TV affair and at some points it even recalls horrific seventies' tat like "The Double Deckers". Director Richard Claus was obviously given the brief to bring the film quickly and under budget. As a result, it feels rushed and cheap. At times the cameras aren't even in focus. Despite having Venice as a backdrop, Claus fails to make any real use of it, shooting it as if it were any other town in the world, instead of a floating city ripe with history and intrigue. He doesn't make enough of the labyrinthine alleys replete with shadowy corners and crumbling statuary, nor does he give any suggestion of the scale of the city, nor the major feature of the area; the canals. Surely such a place would be playground for imaginative kids. The director would rather spend all his time in a set dressed as an abandoned cinema that looks like a backdrop for a Saturday morning kids' show. The special effects are dodgy and the stunts supremely lacking in suspense. A few boat chases and a couple of foot pursuits don't make for the most exciting viewing, especially as they are so poorly accomplished.

Claus has no idea how to pace the film, failing to elucidate the audience about why the two leads are running away in the first place and why they are heading for Venice. Everything in the movie moves too fast; so you never get a chance to figure out what's going on. I suspect that was a conscious decision for the director, in a clumsy attempt to paper over the massive plot holes. What remains is a shallow boys' own adventure that pits children against adults with the most predictable results. The cast consists of a bunch of teeth-and-eyes stage school brats and seasoned actors that should know better. There's nothing here you could call characterisation and that means you never feel for any of the players. It's never made clear what nationality they are supposed to be and it seems odd that a bunch of posh English schoolkids are on the lam in Italy. But that is only one of many inconsistencies that plague the film. The result is that after you've seen all ninety-eight minutes of the film, you'll feel cheated.

The screenplay by Claus and Daniel Musgrave is a poor adaptation of a richly textured book. It fails to capture the magical aspects of novel, the near mythical status of Venice in Prospero and Bo's minds, the excitement of being in the Thief Lord's gang or any of the plentiful emotions felt by the kids. It tries to coast along on the age-old belief that adults simply don't understand kids and that they are the enemy. But the adults are all painted as such basic pantomime villains that they are totally unbelievable. This in turn renders the entire world of the film so unreal that you won't believe the kids need to retreat into a rich fantasy life to escape them. All of the characters are superficial; nothing binds them together but circumstance and allegiances change too swiftly. There isn't any reasoning behind what the characters do or how they behave. The audience is required to makes some serious jumps in logic because of the plot holes that litter the film and there so many of them that the movie feels like a string vest. The writers have tried to make the dialogue kid-friendly, but by excising all the long words, have made it overly simplistic and somewhat patronising.

The gang of kids in the film are standard stage school moppets; photogenic but bland. None of them have the spark that makes a child performance worth watching. Dakota Fanning would hardly be shaking in her boots faced with this lot. They all have very nice diction, but don't have any idea how to convey emotion with their voices. Rollo Weeks proves Weeks by name, weak by nature with his performance as the titular Thief Lord. You can tell what he's trying to do; he is confident and has a reasonable amount of swagger. But he is that bit too young to have tapped into his sex appeal, so doesn't have the requisite charisma to convince as a magnetic leader. Aaron Johnson, who plays Prospero is slightly more emotionally involved in his role, but is still very bland, essentially hitting his marks and saying his lines. George McKay, who plays Riccio seems to think that having a horrible set of false teeth means he doesn't have to do any acting. The only girl in the gang, played by Alice Connor hasn't really got anything to do and the token black character played by Lathaniel Dyer is in a similar situation. Jasper Harris is exactly the kind of blonde acting moppet I despise on principal. He is a pretty little boy who will no doubt get lots of work on the strength of his looks, but he is too aware of what they can do for him already. Consequently, he plays cute most of the time.

Most of the grown-up actors in the movie seem to be under the misapprehension that because they are in a kids' film, they have to drop the subtlety and make everything big. So we are forced to endure a great deal of overacting from people that should know better. Jim Carter is two-dimensional as the well-meaning private detective Victor. The writing means that he isn't a real threat to the kids from the kick-off, but it feels like the actor's just marking time as he bumbles through the movie. Alexei Sayle hasn't been acting for a while and my god, does it show. His performance as Barbarossa is an unbearable slice of ham. He pitches the character somewhere between a pantomime and Fagin and Shylock, literally rubbing his hands and over-enunciating every syllable. Unfortunately this undermines any sense of menace the character may have had. Even acting grande-dame Vanessa Redgrave falls into the trap, acting mad in her cameo as a nun. The only actor that brings any semblance of reality to her performance is Caroline Goodall as Ida. She bucks the trend and plays it straight, giving the only committed performance in the film. If only she had more screen-time we might even care about her.

The score by Nigel Clarke and Michael Csanyi-Wills is the only aspect of the production that treats the story like the swashbuckling adventure it should be. The brooding strings and swooping flutes add much needed excitement and Venice is given a sweeping orchestral introduction. Twinkling piano and chimes try to draw out the magic of the story, while operatic flourishes attempt to add depth. The music is let down a little by a cheesy teenybopper song over the end credits, but is otherwise of high quality. It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't match up.

The special effects throughout are appalling, all of the computer-generated tweaks that breathe life into statues are clumsy and look contrived. The worst example comes towards the end of the film where a magical carousel is made to look like a tatty piece of junk by the shoddy effects. I've seen better work in home-made movies.

"The Thief Lord" is a disappointment from beginning to end, embodying the worst of cheap filmmaking. The production values are dismal, the acting suspect, the writing overly simplistic, ill-conceived and poorly executed. It should be avoided at all costs unless you want to frighten stage school children by showing them what awful dross they may appear in. 

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