Straight From Tribeca: ‘Thieves By Law’ Review

“Thieves by Law” is a film that’s as boring as it is confused, one that knows what it wants to do but is clueless as to how it should be done. It isn’t easy to make a documentary that deals with a secret organization of prisoners in Russia, but that’s no excuse for putting together something that’s this scatterbrained. What’s funny is that with all the details that turn up here, they’re all but useless in a film that doesn’t know how to employ them properly. You’d think that a movie about organized crime would be a bit more organized.

It’s a shame, too, because most of what turns up here looks pretty interesting. We learn that the “Thieves by Law” consist of particularly hardened prisoners who get chosen not only for holding their own among the other inmates, but for resisting the futile attempts of the officers to control them. Most members are decorated with lots of tattoos that all represent different accomplishments and personality traits – one, who has identical tattoos on both of his knees, says that they’re there as testimony that he’ll never kneel before anyone.

For anybody who’s rugged enough to get through all of that, there’s a world of privilege waiting for them on the outside. The ones who have the know-how to work around the system all make not-so-honest livings that are pretty lucrative, so much so that they can afford to share the wealth with their subordinates. Loyalty is actually one of the cornerstones of their way of life – members are also expected to avoid starting families that might interfere with their duties to one another, give hell to the police and show the next generation of members how it’s done. For all of the legal loopholes they take advantage of, even these guys have a set of morals to live by.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what gets uncovered here, but without a narrative arc to hold it together, “Thieves by Law” just wanders from one subject to the next without doing something with them that we can follow. Given that it’s one of the entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, you have to wonder if this was put together as a rush job, one that can satisfy a deadline but not an audience. Somewhere between the festival cut and the theatrical run, the filmmakers seriously need to make the whole add up to the sum of its parts.