Loophole

Another heist movie. This is a cut above average with an excellent cast: acclaimed British film and stage actor Albert Finney. Martin Sheen who had just been shot to fame by Apocalypse Now, alongside Johnathan Pryce,Colin Blakeley, Robert Morley, Susannah Yorke, Dinah Booker and Colin Blakeley. All respected character and lead actors.

Albert Finney plays the leader of a criminal gang whose latest raid has come up short. He plans to break into a vault containing safe deposit boxes. In order to locate the exact location of the vault, he needs the help of an architect who can pinpoint where the tunnel needs to emerge. This is where Martin Sheen comes in.

Worrth watching for the cast giving good performances.

This movie is really faithful to the Robert Pollock's novel, written eight years before. The only book written by this novelist. A book that - according to the legend - inspired Albert Spaggiari to prepare and pull the famous world known Nice - France - bank heist, in July 1976, where the gangsters used the sewers net, the big city intestines, to drill a tunnel and then have access to the safe deposit room. It was a really terrific and terrifying adventure, that Jose Giovanni put on screen in 1979 in LES EGOUTS DU PARADIS. Back to this one, it is very realistic, because Spaggiari and his men could have had the very same problem as the gangsters here...I won't spoil any further.... I like the characters and all the details shown here concerning the preparation and the heist itself. I love the ending, but I understand that many people do not.

Actually a competent little thriller , utterly and totally ruined by a lousy bewildering last 10 mins or so ! .... Honestly its unbelievable and makes no sense whatsoever !

Well done scriptwriters / director for ruining a nice little film that could have been well more regarded , but now i would tell anyone who thought of watching this movie to avoided it as it truly offers up one of the most unsatisfying and stupid endings you could ever think of !

"Loophole" is a disappointingly dull, visually unappealing caper movie. I can recommend it only to genre addicts. The characters are anonymous and cold; you don't connect with them, so you don't care what will happen to them. Still, this minor picture isn't really bad...until its really LOUSY finale. Without revealing it, I can say that the "solution" the screenwriter finds to the characters' problems shows offensive incompetence on his part. The ending (presented as a twist) is simply unacceptable and I can't believe that these respectable actors agreed to play in a film that ended is such a LOUSY way.

Actually, I haven't seen the movie -- but three men in Texas rented this movie and were inspired to re-create the crime in 1984. They held a bank president's wife and daughter hostage in exchange for a ransom of $48,000. Once the money was left in a garbage can, the men used the sewer system to gain access to the false bottom of the garbage can... just like in the movie. However, the FBI arrested one of the men, who ratted out the other two, and they were all tried and convicted. Actually, they almost got away with it -- except the woman they'd counted on to be their alibi "remembered" that they'd been at her house in the afternoon, not the morning. Amusingly, the appellate court judge who heard their appeal started his summary of the case with the line, "The background facts to this case read like a movie script." There's a reason for that, Yer Honor! (If you want to read the case, it's United States v. Moore, 786 F.2d 1308.)