Flawless

Welcome to London, 1960, where everyone bad has jowls and every frame is excessively packed with gratuitous period imagery. This latest film from Il Postino director Michael Radford, a heist drama starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine, is by no means a bad movie, but it isn’t especially great either.

Moore plays an executive at the London Diamond Corporation who is regularly overlooked for promotion due to her gender and is about to get fired. Enter Michael Caine, a widowed office cleaner with a plan to pilfer some diamonds, and he just so happens to need someone to help him carry out his plot. It’s a typical inside-job set-up that takes a while to get going before anything interesting happens. Twists and turns then abound as the supporting cast blusters around indignantly, with Joss Ackland putting in a good show as the head of the diamond corporation.

Deeper subjects are flirted with – African colonialism, the blood diamond trade and communism – but only ever fleetingly and superficially, hinting at a more interesting world that we never really get to see. Direction from Radford is tepid at best, and the central performance from Moore feels detached. Caine gives a spirited turn, providing the only moments of light relief the film has to offer, as well as being the only character to follow a satisfying arc to conclusion.

Moments of tension are successfully staged and the heist itself is the highlight of the film, but a lazy framing narrative involving a modern day interview with a heavily made-up Moore feels dreadfully unnecessary, and while costume, set design and music manage to come together to successfully evoke the period, nothing really comes together as a cohesive whole and everything feels very clinical and anodyne.

Shot and acted without more than a trace of personality and offering only mild thrills and spills, this is a heist movie that isn’t nearly as interesting or exciting as it could be.

JW Smith

Anticipation:

Demi Moore and Michael Caine? Intrigued if nothing else…

Enjoyment:

You won’t look at your watch, but you'll be happy when it's over.

In Retrospect:

Lacking punch and passion, Flawless is really rather flawed.