Based on the true story of the Hatton Garden safe deposit box burglary in 2015 King of Thieves is a film featuring an all star cast of Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent, Paul Whitehouse, Ray Winstone and Charlie Cox as career criminals committing the heist. It’s also going to be a contender for one of the worst films I’ve seen this year.

Nothing seems to work in the 108 minute run time that frankly seems to feel like an ordeal to get through by the halfway point of the film. The plot seems to boil down to a bunch of unlikeable OAP’s swearing a lot and complaining about their ailments. The same joke is repeated ad infinitum about the need to go to the toilet often, doze off to sleep or generally be old. The incessant swearing becomes boorish very quickly, the characters are unlikeable, the motive for the crime is poorly conveyed, it fails to set up the heist in an interesting way and the execution of the heist is so uninteresting that you wonder if the creators had watched a heist movie before.

The fact that the career criminals seem to be so terrible at the job makes you wonder how they could ever not be in prison at this point for the rest of their lives. And any efforts by the director to add some flair to the film by inserting film footage from the seasoned casts early films falls completely flat.

Simply awful.