paul2001sw-1

There's a long tradition of movies depicting groups of (usually sympathetically portrayed) criminal materminds uniting to pull off the ultimate job: think 'The Sting', for example, or 'Ocean's 11'. I've also seen stories about unlikely gangs of more ordinary people improbably doing something similar on a lesser scale. The former type of story is normally slick; the latter play more off the comedy of these people doing it at all. 'Frauds' tells the story of a Spanish art-heist carried out by a group of feisty, expatriate British, middle-aged women, so it would appear to belong to the second category, but it never catches fire. The acting and direction are pedestrian, and the series equivocates between telling us these are ordinary people commiting a great crime against all odds, and telling us they are geniuses of the underworld. There's also a lot of unconvincing swearing - it's not offensive, it just feels like lazy and boring writing. And the gang are stealing Dali's 'The Great Masturbator'. Why that art work? The only logic is to give the script a chance to include lots of smutty jokes, but it doesn't beyond having its characters say "masturbator" all the time in a totally matter of fact way. It's just not clever enough, and whatever potential was in the idea is ultimately unrealised.