Word: brink
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Lying in the vault were about 50 Ibs. of paper money from the Commerzbank of Frankfurt to the Chase Manhattan Bank. It was a treasure far bigger than the $2.78 million taken in the Brink's holdup of 1950, bigger even than the $4.3 million Purolator heist in 1974 in Chicago. The Lufthansa bandits' haul: about $5 million in American dollars, nearly $1 million in jewelry, as well as an undetermined amount of foreign currency...
...post-war Boston setting is faithfully captured, right down to the graffiti on the subways. But the film never takes off. At the end the robbers are led, one by one, past cheering crowds outside the courtroom. It's staged curtain call for the men who gave us the Brink's legend, but the movie doesn't do that legend justice. Like the thieves, Friedkin comes very close to pulling The Brink's Job off, but he bungles the timing...
...blame must be with Friedkin, since the cast couldn't be better. The Brink's gang is played by a bunch of lovable actors who delight in the roles of these bumbling underdogs. Heading the group is Peter Falk as the mastermind--if you can call him that--of this near-perfect heist. His criminal genius is somewhat in doubt, since the movie opens with one of his novice efforts, the burglary of a sausage factory. After much tool-dropping and other displays of incompetence, the job ends with Falk hiding in a room full of chickens, only...
None of this helps the film much. The slow pace leaves the Brink's gang looking like the Three Stooges on quaaludes. Falk and his cohorts Paul Sorvino, Allen Goorwitz and Peter Boyle (whose intermittent Irish accent has to be heard to be believed), all ham up their little peculiarities, but things never quite start rolling. The pace starts to pick up midway through the film, when Warren Oates appears as a half-crazed demolition expert whose plans to blow up the Brink's safe with a bazooka stun the rest of the gang into disbelief...
Falk sometimes manages to escape the director's slow pace. His portrayal of the thief with the heart of gold never falters. When he accidentally discovers that the Brink's fortress is no more than a poorly protected warehouse of money waiting to be hit, he rushes out and buys his wife a 100 per cent muskrat coat to celebrate his upcoming...