With so many options on Netflix, it can take three lifetimes to find a movie you want to watch. I’ll help you narrow down your search: Army of Thieves is not it. It’s pretentious and boring, and it has no charm or emotion. 

The plot was so dull and forgettable. I legitimately struggle to remember what happened during that two hours and thirty minutes. Typically, a movie uses visuals, dialogue, music, and other sensory cues to make the audience feel a certain way. Unless you count the annoyance I felt when I realized I was only halfway through the movie, I felt nothing when I watched this – no fear, joy, sadness, or investment. It did such a poor job building the stakes of the heist and the risks of getting caught that I was disengaged from all of it. It’s just another mass-produced movie pumped out by Netflix to clutter the homepage. 

The protagonist is someone I can only describe as a dorky Daredevil. The protagonist, Sebastian, has borderline superhuman hearing, and he utilizes that to crack vaults in banks. He is infatuated with the stories of a legendary locksmith who made four safes that were thought to be unsolvable. One contains the locksmith’s dead body and was thrown into the ocean, and the other three are located in various banks across Europe, filled with hefty sums of cash. Sebastian teams up with a group of international thieves to infiltrate the banks, solve the safes, and make off with the average earnings of a day at Disneyland. 

I just described the entire movie, so the question may be asked, how do they stretch that into two hours and thirty minutes? I’ll tell you how – with dumb, irritating scenes that last way too long. There are scenes that contribute very little to the plot and give the characters stupid arcs and motivations. One guy in the group of thieves watched a lot of American action movies as a kid and wanted to be like the heroes on the screen. That is something most of us can relate to – wanting to be the best version of ourselves and forming a legacy that will be remembered for generations to come. However, the movie contradicts itself when that same character does nothing heroic throughout the whole movie. He beats up and threatens the innocent, shoots guards, and berates everyone around him. He’s basically the opposite of a hero. And at the end of the film, he says, “I guess I was never a hero, I’m the villain.” But he never attempted to be heroic at any point in the movie, so his whole development is built on nothing. 

The film also produces some unlikable characters, and I genuinely found myself rooting against them. The thieves are so mean-spirited, and it’s not even funny or clever; it’s just annoying. They’re so awkward that it’s like watching a group of people trying to act like natural humans and failing hard. I get that they aren’t normal, everyday Nicks and Nellies, but the actors resemble a group of aliens trying to figure out how to impersonate humans. The main character is so dorky and wimpy, and I cringe every time he opens his mouth. I know that’s part of his character, but he’s got to have a spine in there somewhere.

I think the worst part of this film is that it thinks it’s some high-class, highbrow piece of renowned cinema, but in reality, it’s just another generic, dull, heist movie that’s been done literally a million times. Netflix’s originals aren’t exactly known for their quality, and this movie proves just that. Sure, there are some outliers like Squid Games and Wednesday, but this movie is just another Netflix original flop.