A particularly disturbing piece of news was revealed yesterday: Four paintings with an estimated value of $162.3 million were stolen from a Switzerland museum. This is disturbing neither because of the horrible monetary damage done to the museum, nor the potential loss of important cultural heritage. It can only be described as such because of the terribly blase style of the three thieves, and the subsequent description by police of the robbery as "spectacular."
Spectacular? Police reports say the black-clad robbers walked into the museum, subdued the guards with a pistol and grabbed the four paintings. They then simply walked out the front door of the museum, loaded the paintings into a white van and drove away.
Spectacular? This robbery had all the grace and elegance of your typical Minit-Mart stick-up, right down to the costumes and getaway car. If there's anything Danny Ocean and the rest of Hollywood's professional thieves have taught us, it's that robbing a museum should not be this easy.
Here's how it should've gone down: First, the leader of the group would need to assemble a crack team encompassing every specialization necessary for a high-profile heist. This would include a smooth-talking aristocrat type (a la Pierce Brosnan in the Thomas Crown Affair or that French guy who did the laser dance in Ocean's Twelve), a bad-ass enforcer type with fists of iron, an awkward tech guy to subvert the museum's security system, a whiskey-soaked veteran who gets pulled back into "the game" but growls at least three or four times that this is his last job, and Mark Wahlberg.
Then, they would have to run surveillance on the museum for at least six months until each team member had the precise schedule of the museum security detail memorized. Then, they would call in a favor to a shady arms dealer to acquire absurd amounts of weapons that never really get used, along with one really cool weapon which comes in handy (not just one pistol like those real life jokers).
Next, they would find an extremely small window of opportunity during which it would be possible to steal the paintings. Despite being told multiple times that there was no room for error, they would pull it off flawlessly in the face of at least a dozen major oversights, errors or unforeseeable calamities.
After acquiring said paintings, they would most certainly not load them into an inconspicuous white van and cruise off without pursuit. Instead, they would load the paintings into any one of the following vehicles: a Mini Cooper, a speedboat, a helicopter, a prototypical single man jet hijacked from a military installation or a hot air balloon. More than likely, though, they would somehow employ all of the above in a desperate attempt to confuse law enforcement.
Nonetheless, a savvy detective with a shady past would track them down and incur more than the paintings are actually worth in property damage while pursuing the thieves.
Ultimately, Mark Wahlberg would confront the detective and convince him to let them go "for old time's sake."
So what have we learned from all this? Mostly, that real life crime is just disappointing, not sexy or debonair in any way. To satisfy the craving for cooler thieves, we'll just have to wait for the inevitable Ocean's 25, The Brazillian Job or The Thomas Crown Affair Two.