World Premiere, 89 min., Color, HDCAM
Country and Year: USA (2006)
Director: Malik Bader
Producers: Sam Bader, Derrick Grahn

Review by: Charlie Prince
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

“Why aren’t you in jail?” That was the first question for director Malik Bader from the audience after a screening of Street Thief at the Tribeca Film Festival this past Sunday. The questions that followed were equally hostile. Someone in the front of the room demanded their money back. The filmmakers seemed pleased with all of this.

Street Thief presents itself as audacious: a “filmed record” of an actual burglar committing actual crimes, with a documentary crew following him around to catch it all first hand. Sounds kind of, I dunno, illegal, right? It certainly looks realistic, and the filmmakers confidently told the audience that “everything covered in the film I have first-hand knowledge of, everything in there is real,” but, and here’s where things start to get gray, there were some reenactments, or as Bader said “certain scenes were more planned, staged” than others. Ah. But there was no script, he assured us, he was just telling it like it is. At one point he said something along the lines of “I can take down any score,” aka I am, or at least have the ability to be, a professional criminal. “I cut open a real safe with a saw,” and “everything you see in the film happened in real life.” But, they’re careful to point out, it’s not a documentary, and they never said it was a documentary, it’s called a “filmed record” to acknowledge the re-enactment element. “There is no real Casper per se,” Bader assures us. (Casper is his character in the film). But, they tell us, the Tribeca Film Festival had “a lot of questions,” before accepting it, and then wanted to categorize it as a documentary (it is categorized as a “Discovery” film, along with many fictional features, allegedly at Bader’s insistence).

So which is it? I’ll tell you point blank that if we assume for a second that the film is completely fake, and that all these hints of it being essentially a documentary are exaggerated (but brilliant marketing strategy), then this is one helluva great film (perhaps with a lackluster ending). If, on the other hand, this is essentially a documentary, well then the lack of a stellar ending is excusable (real life rarely has cinematic endings) but there are other concerns, like “is this okay?”

We’ll get back to this analysis at the end of the review, but let me describe the film itself for a bit here to give you some context. The film starts off with shaky, hand-held camerawork. The footage is low-quality and it’s at night. We’re watching a robbery take place at a store (the camera appears to be angled from the rooftop of a building across the street). We watch a guy cut the phone wires and then smash the glass on the door. He’s careful to break all the glass on the door, so it’s hard to see (once he’s done) that the door has actually been broken. A flash of time on the screen indicates that a lot of time has passed, and we see the person coming out, it’s now early morning and the sun is up.

Hardly the shots that would typify a blockbuster action movie, right? This is “gritty.” Then we meet the burglar, driving in his car, who immediately gets down to brass tacks to explain what he will and will not tell us in this film. He will tell us and show us how crime really goes down, what it’s really like to rob a place. He won’t tell you his back story, or why does he do it, or did he ever consider doing something else. “You’re not going to get a sob story out of me,” he scolds the cameraman.

But we do get some backstory. It all started when he was a little kid. His grandmother took him to the store and he watched as she cleaned out boxes and boxes of candy, simply dumping the stuff into her purse, and they walked out of the store scot-free. He was hooked. Today he’s a professional, has never even gotten close to being caught, we’re told, and we see all the prep work he does to make sure that trend continues. He scopes out a place until he knows everyone who works there, what time they get to work, what time they leave, when the cleaning crew arrives, how much money they make on an average night, if there’s a security truck pickup and if so, when, and when the best time is to raid a place. He walks into a place to help prepare it sometimes – in one case removing screws from a window and installing fake screws in their place so that when he comes back to rob it, he can kick in the window and have direct access to the safe. Once on the job, he uses police scanners to monitor for police approaching, at one point abandoning a robbery at the slightest police action on the radio. The documentarians note that the cops arrive only a few minutes later.

Bader, who plays Casper, is full of seemingly real advice. What tool is best used to break glass and how stores with 20 or more employees are easy to infiltrate because everyone just assumes you’re supposed to be there if you walk around like you own the place. We watch Bader fake an Indian accent to figure out who the manager is, and talk his way out of being somewhere he shouldn’t (in an “employees only” area). This guy’s good at what he does.

Casper does seem to have his quirks though. Despite a short explanation of why he sticks with prostitutes rather than actual relationships with women, (too risky - they’ll blab about his line of work), we learn little about him personally. And the mystery only gets bigger when – seemingly on a whim – he robs a night club called Slick’s. The documentary guys following him are shocked — he’s done no prep work, this goes against everything he stands for. Casper doesn’t have answers for their questions, saying essentially if you want to come with me fine, and if not that’s fine too (they accompany him). Once inside Slick’s, he finds something in a drawer (we can see at least a lot of money in it from where the documentarian is standing) and Casper flips out, orders the film crew out and starts to break things up. He won’t explain what is happening and decides to lay low for a couple months thereafter – something has him spooked but we don’t know what. And then he resurfaces.

The big heist we watch him pull off, however, is a movie theater (the irony). He rummages through the trash to confirm they make a boatload on weekends and don’t have an armored car pickup until Monday. Again the filmmakers are invited in during the robbery (Bader has hidden in one of those giant cardboard displays in the lobby until everyone leaves). They use a mechanical saw to cut through a wall to get to the room with the safe (“You see that,” Casper says to the documentary crew following him, pointing to a security trip wire that is mountedon the door to the room, “that’s why we came in through the f*cking wall!”). Casper then squares off against a giant safe, sawing his way into that through multiple layers and hitting pay dirt. The rake? $104,100. Illegal, but not shabby.

Three days later the film crew goes back to his place to meet up with him and they find the place crawling with cops. This is where, to me, the movie ceases to be nearly as interesting as it has been so far, so let me summarize this quickly. The documentary filmmaker characters in the film are now worried they’ve lost their subject, so they call around to find him in jail and can’t find him anywhere. Later they find out the cops had found a bloodied car that seemed to indicate, by the amount of blood that was lost, that Casper had died. Much time is spent drawing intriguing connections to the anomaly in his work – that night at Slick’s (no robbery was reported!). Is it run by the Russian mob? Did they kill him for something he shouldn’t have done? Why won’t the club owners talk to us? Why are the police so comfortable that the guy is dead, with no body to show for it? Maybe this death was staged….. In the meantime, the filmmakers (in the film) have approached a lawyer to find out how their footage will be dealt with legally (“You may lose some of your footage,” he warns them).

To be honest, I spent most of the ending of the film thinking about the grittiness of the first hour. The ending didn’t seem nearly as interesting. How you case a joint, how real it seemed at times, is this stuff real? — that was interesting. As the film ended, the question of authenticity was all the audience wanted to know about, so let’s get back to that discussion, because there’s a real kicker I’ve not yet mentioned.

Malik Bader, the director, has only worked on short films and music videos before – always with his brother, Sam Bader. From accusations shouted from the crowd (which could have been staged), we come to find out that Malik’s brother came up to New York last week and was arrested on criminal charges including armed robbery and kidnapping, in connection with a truck hijacking last month in Chicago (according to the Daily News). I haven’t confirmed this myself, but the news reports seem to be treating it as true. Malik Bader said Sunday night he wouldn’t use his brother going to jail as a publicity stunt, and that it wouldn’t be a good publicity stunt anyway (he noted that if they wanted to pull a publicity stunt, they could have robbed a place in New York). But of course, the opposite is true, because this breathes an enormous amount of credibility to the idea that Bader has essentially made a film about something he knows well, that this is very nearly a documentary of real crime as celebrated by real criminals.

When you think about it, it’s possible that they’re not lying even if everything on screen has been a reenactment. Let’s suppose he knows criminals, and has simply based his story on what he heard from their experiences. Nothing illegal about that – crime stories have often been made to feel more “real” by drawing from real life things they see or hear around them (as in when such and such crime film, take the recent Italian actioner Uno Bianca, is heralded as being “ripped from the headlines”). So maybe these guys just knew criminals and learned to turn their lemons into lemonade. But if brother Sam Bader is the real thing, a real criminal committing crimes just like the ones shown in the film, well now we’re looking at a different dynamic. After all, these two brothers have done lots of things together in the past, it’s hard to imagine…. Well, I won’t finish that sentence, but regardless, arrestee Sam Bader was the producer on this film in any case.

So, now let’s assume, as the audience after Sunday’s screening seemed to have, that they’re being pretty much honest here – they are career criminals showing us what it’s really like to commit crimes, and giving us some helpful tips on how to do things right. Now we have all sorts of enormously controversial issues. After all, if many condemn society’s endorsement of The Sopranos for celebrating criminal culture, this is taking that ten steps further. Here, the actual criminals are being feted and awarded for demonstrating their actual crimes! Maybe the moral fabric of the country has gone too far! Heck, there are even legal implications. A famous first amendment case surrounding a purported “how to” manual on committing contract killings (Hitman) gained attention when the publisher of the book was successfully sued by the surviving family members of someone who was murdered, when the murderer was caught with this book in hand. It was found that the book had “deliberate intent” to encourage people to commit crimes, and was therefore tortiously liable for the damages. Could that not apply to this film? If my store is robbed, and the robber was found with a copy of this film in his apartment, can I sue the distributor for my losses? Maybe so, even if it turns out the film is a fake - it turned out the book Hitman was originally a fictional novel, simply presented as real to help sell it.

I was intrigued enough by all this chatter that I waited around after the screening on the sidewalk outside the theater to have a moment to talk to the director myself: “What if reviewers call this the second Blair Witch Project, for claiming to be something it’s obviously not?” Malik, who had just finished telling everyone in the theater that “everything you see in the film is real,” surprised me by saying something quite different: that he didn’t want the enjoyment of the film to ride on whether or not it was real. What matters is not whether it’s real, but whether it felt realistic. What he really set out to do with this film was to give the audience a sense of what it was “really like” to be present when these crimes occur. He elaborated, pointing out how silly many allegedly authentic crime movies are, with people opening a safe with a NASA-grade torch. “That torch would ignite an entire building” he laughed, “everything in the safe would be ashes.” Hmm. He threw in as an extra that it’s easy to fake your own death, how he knew a guy who used to keep 2 buckets of his own blood at his place (he’d extract a little bit each day) so that he could fake his own death and skip town if he ever needed to.

Who drops a statement like that in casual conversation?!? He was beginning to persuade me. Up to that point, I had assumed this was a marketing trick, and a fun one that I was enjoying. But the level of detail to this scam, if it’s a scam, is amazing. He was explaining how a safe really has that powdery anti-fire stuff in between the first and the second layer like you see in the film. Then again, this guy is an actor, and a magnetic one (and maybe an excellent one, unless it turns out he’s just playing himself). But then a moment later I thought maybe I had detected a crack in the armor. Malik had walked off a bit, and my friend was asking one of the producers about another character who appears in the film. “Was he an actor, or is he, as he’s presented in the film, really a criminal in jail for robberies?” The answer again added credibility: that guy is really in jail, but the truth is we fed him the lines you hear in the film. If this guy’s really in jail, and they want to project a faked project as real, wouldn’t that be a linchpin in trying to maintain the story? Why give that up?

BUT, I wasn’t watching the producer, I was watching two people who had been hanging out on the sidewalk with these guys, apparently friends of the filmmakers. They were laughing as they were listening, and I could have sworn I heard one of them say something under his breath to his friend like “ha, keep acting.” I may have just been trying too hard to find something fake in all this, but I could have sworn I heard something. They were laughing anyways, and the poker player in me was sure I’d just detected a “tell” — a bluff. “Oh okay, so these guys are full of it, then?” I immediately asked the suspicious, laughing pair, as if the under-the-breath comment had been meant for me in the first place. “We’re just giving him a hard time,” the friend mumbled. But then, if this was a marketing ploy, you wouldn’t expect them to give up the goose quite that easily. So I’m going to go with gut instinct on this and believe that I saw “a tell” there on that sidewalk, and that there’s a lot of slick marketing going on here. Bader may have been around a lot of criminals (maybe including his brother), and in the film he might be drawing on what he heard them say, but in the end this isn’t a documentary by any means, it’s a fully re-enacted, well thought out, fantastically gritty crime story told essentially in the first person. Let’s be serious, a movie centering around the robbery of a movie theater? They’re having some fun there.

So, with those ethical issues potentially resolved, the film joins some interesting company. The infamous Belgian film Man Bites Dog would be an obvious influence on this feature. In that film, a camera crew follows around a serial killer, and as they get drawn more and more towards the role of a “participant” in the crimes they’re documenting, it raises absurd, potentially damning issues about media today. But it’s obviously fake. On the other hand, The Blair Witch Project made a killing pretending it was real, when it obviously wasn’t. Certainly there is no shortage of crime films based very closely on real crime events. What makes this film interesting is the attention to detail, the little additional elements that suggest a practical working knowledge. Just before the cinema robbery, for example, we see, among many other things Casper does before setting out, that he sticks a small amount of money in his sock, which he explains is “run cash – in case I gotta get a bus or something.” This is gritty crime, reminding me more than anything of the wonderful Richard Widmark-type film noirs that have been hitting dvd shelves hard in the last couple years. On that level the film works very well, and if we take what Bader told me on the sidewalk – that the film should turn not on whether it’s real but on whether it succeeds in feeling real, in conveying what it feels like to be in Casper’s shoes, then the film succeeds. On that score, this film is a near masterpiece. But it is Bader that makes the character so interesting, and the second he’s off-camera, my interest level dropped a notch. It’s not that the “did he fake his death” ending doesn’t work, it’s just a step down from the magnetism and intrigue that Bader brought to the Casper role.

Pending more information breaking about Sam Bader’s actual arrest (or not), my guess is that this film will be intriguing enough to get a release of some kind. Remember how long you debated Memento with your friends, what really happened, etc.? This movie has that going for it in a big way (I’ve given this film more thought than the next 10 films I’ve seen at the fest combined). Is it real, or is it not real? Does it blur the line too much? Whether it’s real and should be condemned or fake and a brilliant marketing strategy, either way I’m fascinated, and either way you should see the film the second you possibly can.

CLICK HERE TO READ A CSB INTERVIEW WITH ‘STREET THIEF’ DIRECTOR MALIK BADER

Related Links:
::: Official Site
::: Tribeca Film Festival Site

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© Charlie Prince