FilmJudge - The Thief Lord

REVIEW

The Thief Lord
2006
Certificate: PG | Runtime: 98 | Director: Richard Claus
Starring: Rollo Weeks, Aaron Johnson, Jasper Harris

After running away from their Godparents' custody, Prosper (Johnson) and Bo (Harris) travel to Venice where they are taken in by the mysterious Thief Lord (Weeks) and his band of orphans. Soon after he is asked to steal a precious artifact, his followers discover that he's actually wealthy and lives with his highly strict father. None the less, they attempt to steal the item in question and in doing so they uncover a magical secret of the city's past.

Despite not exactly being part of the target audience for The Thief Lord, there was something about it I was quite looking forward to. It looked like Peter Pan meets Indiana Jones for kids, and that actually sounded like fun. Unfortunately, the film is more like a school play that somebody accidentally filmed, complete with some fairly rubbish acting, a surprisingly drab plot and cheap production values.

I don't like criticising child actors because it never seems entirely fair, but when it actually harms the film it's the right thing to do. In the title role, Weeks is simply poor. He switches between annoyingly smug prefect mode and sulky rich boy mode with remarkable ease, and at no point during the film do we ever really like him. Johnson is slightly better, but he's still remarkably wooden; in fact, little Harris is probably the best of the bunch and that's really only because he has the 'Aww' factor going for him. What's amazing though is that the adult actors don't fair any better either. Jim Carter and Caroline Goodall are adequate, but Alexei Sayle is dreadful, and I'm pretty sure Vanessa Redgrave was drunk when she filmed her scenes, because that's how she comes across.

The plot, involving a 200-year-old magical merry-go-round, is potentially intriguing. But the film meanders around this for too long, throwing in pointless subplots that don't really go anywhere. When we finally get to the crux of the matter, none of the characters seem particularly excited about it. Mind you, this probably has something to do with what the thing actually looks like.

The naffness of the merry-go-round itself - seriously, it looks like I made it, and I can't even put MFI furniture together - highlights another big problem with the film. The whole thing has an undeniably cheap look about it. Not every film should or can have a huge budget, but it's certainly apparent that The Thief Lord didn't have one big enough. I know the main character is a kid, but does his costume really have to look like he made it himself in art class? Do the magical transformations on the merry-go-round have to look like a 3-D theme park ride from the 1980s?

Director (and co-writer) Claus should take the blame for not making the most of Venice either. While Venice doesn't in actuality look like the picturesque depiction we saw recently in Casanova, the majority of shots are so constricted and unnecessarily close the film may as well have been shot in Milton Keynes and nobody would have noticed.

I've not actually read the book The Thief Lord is based on, so in that respect I have no idea how true it is to the original material. However, as a film it's undoubtedly poor, and what could have been a youthful swashbuckler full of magic and wonder, is in fact a group of kids plodding around aimlessly and looking for a piece of Homebase furniture.

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