THE BEST THIEF IN THE WORLD
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2004 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
Jacob Kornbluth's THE BEST THIEF IN THE WORLD suffers from a large collection of self-inflected wounds. Its digital cinematography isn't sufficiently lit, giving it washed out colors and insufficient contrast. The result is a film with an exceedingly ugly and uninviting look. The harsh and grating techno score makes the movie as unappealing for the ears as the eyes. I'd like to be able to report that the story makes it worth overlooking the movie's many technical flaws, but it doesn't. The underwritten film features unsympathetic and unbelievable characters.
The movie's one idea is that a rebellious young kid named Izzy, played with complete blandness by Michael Silverman, breaks into apartments in order to do mild acts of vandalism from stealing small sums of money to writing obscenities on mirrors. Think little Izzy may eventually graduate to a bit larger crimes? Of course.
In a failed attempt to gain our sympathy, the story has the father being an invalid who has had a stroke and has lost control of most of his body. He calls everyone "mother." As soon as the father gets home, Izzy asks him to play chess. Guess what? He can't do it. This is one of the story's many manipulative moments and one of many that just doesn't ring true.
Izzy's mother (Mary-Louise Parker) is an English teacher who is about to lose her job since they won't give her six months off of work in order to take care of her husband. Izzy's maternal grandmother shows up from Michigan and is utterly obnoxious from the moment she walks in the door. The script has quite a bit of difficulty in creating characters who are credible.
Easily the worse parts of the movie are its many musical interludes. Two African-American kids about five-years-old, using a long stream of F-words, rap away in a school yard. The film cuts back again and again to them with their fingers-across-the-blackboard songs. These musical bits have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. But the story is so thin that it does need some padding, which these irritating children do provide. And they are so bad, it does make you glad to have the rest of the story back. They also serve to keep you from falling asleep, which is a real problem.
THE BEST THIEF IN THE WORLD runs 1:30. The film is not rated but would be R for sex, nudity and pervasive language and would be acceptable for most teenagers.
The film played at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
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