El robo a Mussolini

Stealing from Il Duce at the end of the Second World War is an interesting premise. In this film set in Milan in 1945, a gang of Italians who hate the fascist regime plan to take back (or steal if you wish) the loot that Mussolini has stolen from Italians. How do they get it, they need a plan to get into the warehouse that hides the treasure. So starts a lot of double dealings and treachery.

A decent cast helps in this implausible story and it's also filmed very well, with a great Italian soundtrack too. Although set at a serious time in modern history this film doesn't take itself too seriously and has it's comedic moments. Though not perfect it has a lot going for it, worth a watch if you love Italy.

Sometimes a movie leaves you with some thoughts to think about, the other times it leaves you with nothing, as if you've never watched a movie at all. Rapiniamo il Duce is sadly closer to the latter but not without its buts too.

Ever since I started learning Italian, their movies were mostly misses for me; it's an expressive language and for the most part I just couldn't grab what the characters are saying - and I was just reading the subtitles! - but this one was different. Maybe because it was produced for Netflix but I just didn't feel like it was really made for Italians and that's on the negative side actually. The whole movie seems like an American remake but with an all-Italian cast and that dissonance is palpable starting the first minutes.

On the positive side though Rapiniamo il Duce is a stylish, fast-paced heist drama with fantastic inclusions of animated segments and 1940s appropriate soundtrack but it lacks consistency and the setting (last days of WWII) is only there to bring a feeling of urgency into narrative, not to be a leading vehicle for it. Main characters are no names that we know little to nothing about and therefore are not capable to empathize with anyone - the story plays out so fast it hasn't got time to draw backstories longer than a sentence or a five second clip and that rush is all over the place. The jokes would've been a well-fitting addition and probably the life saver for the movie but they don't exist here as well.

All in all this is a well-crafted movie that looks marvelous on paper, as a comic book adaptation but as a standalone feature it is as lifeless as its main characters.

There's nothing so wrong with this movie that it ever becomes unwatchable, but there isn't really a good reason to watch it, either. It starts off fine, but as it went on, I became increasingly restless. The number of derivative and predictable plot elements really started to pile up, and the pacing felt off.

The worst part, I thought, was that they didn't really do much with the premise. This is an Italian movie set during the end of World War II, and they barely even used that setup. It could have been set in the United States during the Civil War or Prohibition, and there probably wouldn't need to be many changes.

The characters were likeable, though, and it hits all the notes that you expect a heist comedy to hit.

This film tries to be a free run quoting old films like Mario Monicelli's "Soliti ignoti" and other films that were successful comedies of the glorious past of Italian cinema. It also feels free to use music of more recent times, willing to be walk back and forth of time. All this could be good, but at the end it doesn't work. Why? Because the characters are not well designed and the actors are lost in their grotesque representation. An expensive film with a lot of noise and action that does not excite and leads nowhere. You could take just as fun action, but it fails to do so and the narrative gets lost in the attempt to amaze the viewer. I wish Netflix could focus on more meaningful films!

As soon as you hear one of the female protagonists singing Paint it Black, you know or should know your leg is being pulled. Gag piles on gag as the story moves from silly to ridiculous. The acting is almost as bad as the dubbing. There have been countless films, maybe not countless, that poke fun at the tropes of war from courage to heroic. I think of Kelly's Heroes for example. Not so much as witty as it is laughable. Need to toss away ninety minutes with little to recall or clog up your grey matter, you have found it here. I didn't recognize any of the actors, and should I see them again, I doubt I would be able to recall any of them.