'Steal' Movie Review

Some films are good. Some films are smart. And then there's Steal, which is neither, but commits to its own dumb premise so completely that you almost have to respect it.

Released in 2002 (originally titled Riders), Steal is the English-language debut of French director Gérard Pirès. Four years earlier, he'd had a giant European hit with Taxi, the Luc Besson-written caper that turned Marseille car chases and bank-robbing Germans into one of the most successful French film franchises ever. With Steal, Pirès tries the same trick in English, with a four-person crew of bank robbers who escape on rollerblades. Yes. Rollerblades.

The pitch is pure 2002. Slim (Stephen Dorff) leads a team of extreme-sports junkies pulling off five heists in a single week, each with a different sport as the getaway. Inline skating through downtown traffic, snowboarding off rooftops, rock climbing across an enormous bridge, an armored truck driven straight into the Saint Lawrence River so the crew can swim out the back of it. It's Point Break if Bigelow had been raised entirely on Mountain Dew commercials.

Why watch it now? Because almost no one's making this kind of film anymore. The early 2000s had a brief, glorious window when extreme sports were a marketable plot device, and Steal lives right in the middle of that window with xXx and Extreme Ops. It's a time capsule. The skating tricks are real. The wirework is shamelessly visible. The whole thing clocks in at a tidy 83 minutes. There's no fat. The film starts robbing banks before you've even sat down.

Stephen Dorff is the engine. He's a strange and underrated movie star, the kind who can hold a camera for a long time without speaking and still feel like the most interesting person in the frame. (He'd come off Blade and Cecil B. Demented by this point, and would later anchor the third season of True Detective opposite Mahershala Ali.) In Steal he's all twitchy charm and flat denim, playing Slim like a guy who's already a little bored of his own genius. The film doesn't give him a real character, just a posture. He wears that posture like he picked it up at a thrift store and decided it fit.

The supporting cast is where the film gets weird in the most fun way. Bruce Payne goes spectacularly over-the-top as the corrupt Lieutenant Macgruder, which is exactly what you want from the actor who once made Wesley Snipes work overtime in Passenger 57. And then. There's Steven Berkoff. The Steven Berkoff. The British character actor who played the Bond villain in Octopussy, the corrupt art dealer in Beverly Hills Cop, the guy with the Stanley Kubrick credits, shows up here as a Southern mob enforcer named Surtayne in what can only be described as an Elvis wig. He appears to be acting in a different film entirely. And that film is much, much better. Every time he's on screen, Steal briefly turns into a cult movie. Then he leaves and it goes back to being itself.

Quick aside that's actually fascinating, Bruce Payne and Steven Berkoff weren't strangers when they made this. Berkoff had cast Payne in his London stage productions of West and Greek years earlier. So the two scariest screen presences in the film are old theatre collaborators sneaking back into a frame together. You can sort of feel it in the scenes they share.

Natasha Henstridge plays the detective who falls for Slim. By every available account she's in the film for fewer minutes than her billing suggests, and the romance is laughable on paper. The film clearly wants the De Niro and Pacino diner scene from Heat. What it gets is two attractive people exchanging glances in a sauna and calling that a relationship. This is the film's biggest weakness. The emotional stuff doesn't land. The action does.

Now here's the trivia that genuinely surprised me. The cinematographer is Tetsuo Nagata. The same Tetsuo Nagata who, the year before Steal, had just won his first César for The Officers' Ward, and who would go on to win his second César for shooting Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose. He's a serious, painterly DP, the kind who lights faces like they're worth lighting. And he's shooting a movie about rollerblading bank robbers. You can sometimes feel him sneaking real cinematography into the chase sequences, holding on a wet street or a vertical drop a beat longer than the script earns.

A couple more things worth looking out for. The film is set in the United States but was shot almost entirely in Montreal. If you watch carefully you'll spot Quebec flags and Place des Arts in the background of supposedly American street scenes, and the McGill College Avenue rollerblade chase is one of the most impressive set pieces nobody talks about. The big bridge sequence (the rock-climbing one) was shot at the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, the only real American footage in the movie. Also, the soundtrack pulls in I Monster's "Daydream in Blue", that hazy trip-hop track that got sampled into approximately 800 car commercials over the next decade. If a song instantly makes you feel like you're inside a 2002 ad break, that's the one.

The film made about half of its $15 million budget back. Reviews were not kind. The BBC's Neil Smith called it "gloriously terrible," which is, weirdly, the perfect blurb. Rotten Tomatoes settled it at 29%.

But here's the thing. Steal is exactly the right length, exactly the right kind of stupid, and exactly the right amount of committed to its own bit. You don't watch it for the plot, which barely exists. You watch it for the rollerblade chase down a Montreal boulevard pretending to be a Manhattan boulevard, for Berkoff's Elvis wig, for Dorff doing that thing where he looks at a woman across a room and the room just kind of agrees with him. Put it on. Don't think about it too hard. Eighty-three minutes later you'll feel exactly nothing, and somehow that's the point.