I first heard about The Thieves because it was supposed to be a Korean version of Ocean’s Eleven. That was back in 2012, and I sought it out then. Unfortunately the copy I found had subtitles in some other language and so it languished unwatched for a long time.

Until now…because lately I’ve had a lot of opportunity to sit on the sofa (holding a sleeping baby) so I finally found English subs and watched the movie. The similarities to Ocean’s Eleven are merely on the surface – sure it is an ensemble cast cooperating to perform a heist; but the characterization is quite different. Ocean’s Eleven is about glitz, glamour and a con. The Thieves has cons too, many cons. There are a lot of double crossing each other, even though their goal is the same heist.

It’s a fun movie, and 3 out of 5 stars in my book. The main issue I had is that a lot of the scenarios which cause an event to happen just doesn’t make sense (for example, how would they not know that the double agent is a double agent. They were never under deep cover so their identity would have been known). For some reason, there were just many instances that didn’t pass the Willingful Suspension of Disbelief test. Also it doesn’t have that nice feeling in Ocean’s Eleven when all the pieces of the heist falls smoothly into place.

However, it was fun to see the different Asian cultures appear in the same movie. They spoke Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese in the same movie! I think this movie was better than the other high profile Korean movie I watched

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: korea, moviereview