Prosper (Johnson) made a promise to his younger brother Bo (Harris) that he would never leave him alone. Breaking out of the orphanage, Prosper takes Bo from his foster parents and makes for Venice - the city where their dead mother wanted to live. There they meet Scipio (Weeks) - the adolescent Thief Lord - who takes the hungry brothers into his young gang of thieves. Accepting a job to steal the wooden wing of a lion statue from the nefarious antiques dealer Barbarossa (Alexei Sayle), the gang find themselves embroiled in a quest to find a beautiful magic treasure. Meanwhile, Bo's foster parents have hired a bumbling detective to find him.
Based on the fantasy novel by Cornelia Funke, Thief Lord is neither fantastic nor novel and the only thing 'Funke' is the smell of rotting vegetables being thrown at the screen. Kicking off with the narrative equivalent of being shot out of a cannon (we see the brothers escape the orphanage, the foster home, jump on a train, hop on a boat, arrive in Venice, hook up with the Thief Lord and get chased by the detective - all in the first three minutes) Thief Lord still feels like you've been sitting there for three hours. With a cast of mostly pre-adolescent kids, the acting on show is poor, you wish the Thief Lord would steal some talent while their adult counterparts fair no better. If you want to look you might pick up on a Peter Pan-esque theme but you'll probably have left with your bored kids in tow by that stage. Venice looks great, though.
