Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers (2012)
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 19
Fresh: 16 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.8/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 1
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 243
Movie Info
Their crimes resemble high-octane Hollywood action movies: a sports car speeds through a Dubai shopping mall, crashing into the windows of a Graff jewelry store. Masked, gun-wielding men jump out of the car and stuff fistfuls of diamonds into their satchels before screeching off. In London, they took all of three minutes to make off with $30 million in diamonds. Dubbed the Pink Panthers, they're captured - on surveillance tapes that record their astonishing lightning strikes with hypnotic
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All Critics (19) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (16) | Rotten (3)
[The] excursions into moral and sociological themes are what makes "Smash and Grab" so intriguing, and what separate it from a kind of "Ocean's Eleven"-style verite.
Top CriticThe world's most successful ring of diamond thieves is inventively and insightfully explored in the documentary "Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers."
Havana Marking's imaginatively made documentary is a gripping portrait of a daring international jewel-theft ring.
The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.
Using real-life surveillance footage and interviews with several of the gang's members themselves, this eerily timely true-crime documentary fascinates.
The insider's level of detail that gives so many good crime movies their bite is also what makes the documentary "Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers" guiltily absorbing.
It's pacey and often exhilarating. And also strikingly timely.
The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers' bravura with an organisational flair of its own.
A delightful documentary that dances along the edge between intellectual think-piece and ring-a-ding, Ocean's-style criminal lifestyle celebration.
Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers is entertaining and insightful. A must see.
The film will more than scratch an itch for heist film fans waiting for the next Topkapi, Rififi, or The Thomas Crown Affair.
Havana Marking's documentary ... purports to be a true-life detailing of such felons, but is far less engaging, And due to certain directorial choices, it also comes across as somewhat factually dubious.
Fascinating and gripping.
The most interesting aspect of "Smash and Grab" is that the thieves, while not exactly repentant, are depicted as fallible and human.
Smash & Grab is so impressed with The Panthers, whose reputation has a (largely phony) Robin Hood element, that it often tips into unjustified fawning.
It's entertaining as far as it goes, but this doc's greatest value may be as research material for the next great international caper film.
It occasionally succumbs to the pitfalls of the mock-thriller kitsch it slyly dismantles, but it's made up for in a wry and experimental visual style that satirically paints a vibrant crime fantasia.
Audience Reviews for Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
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Latest News on Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
October 4, 2013:
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Foreign Titles
- Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers (DE)
- Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers (UK)
