Will Penn hits the ultimate payload with Dublin International Film Festival's Irish Premiere of No Ordinary Heist.
It isn't often that you feel a buzz around a movie these days. Much ink has been spilled about the state of modern cinema. The last time I could say something concretely registered as a vibration on the cinematic Richter scale was Barbenheimer. And there have only been a few tremors since. But a lobby of the Lighthouse Cinema, amidst an audience abuzz with excitement, Dublin International Film Festival ushers in the hotly anticipated No Ordinary Heist. Perhaps it's due to the excitement of a heist film, the prestige of Eddie Marsan, or the rising stardom of Éanna Hardwicke? Maybe it is relief at getting out of this February rain. Or maybe all of the above.
Colin McIvor's film, No Ordinary Heist, is grounded in real and tactile stakes. While others favour high thrills and flashy action, this is effective because it is underlined by implied threat. It builds steadily, tension implied in the ash clinging to the edge of a cigarette, or a furtive glance in a rear-view mirror. Small moments, constantly stacked on top of one another, compounding, and juxtaposed against the banal domesticity of Richard Murray (Eddie Marsan) as he fights with his wife, or the carefree drinking of Barry McKenna (Éanna Hardwicke). The camera masterfully focuses in upon his carelessness and his manager's disapproving regard.
Through a pressurised irony, the two become inextricably linked, like two rutting stags, their mistrust striking at the very heart of the film's resonance. While those seeking a documentary or even a Zodiac-style commitment to actual events will be sorely disappointed, what McIvor reaches for is authenticity, a commitment to the dramatic essence of what happened, without necessarily exposing the private lives of the real people. In this sense, the story is very relatable; workplace disagreements, power dynamics, the social fissures of a place still healing, all tied into a plot that twists with tension, never fully resolving.
The point is not veracity but finding a fictional point of entry into a different time and an impossibly different set of emotional circumstances. As it becomes apparent that these two diametrically opposed men must work together to get their loved ones back safely, the tension compounds relentlessly. A redundancy dispute, ignored, festers beneath the surface as the two toil to appease their faceless tormentors. And then there is Mags, Michelle Fairley as the every watching security guard, a presence that threatens to detonate everything. Toward a breathless conclusion, the chaos feels ready to spill out at any moment into something altogether more uncontrollable.
But despite its emotional heft, the film takes tender moments for comedy. Marsan and Hardwicke are truly excellent together, at loggerheads one moment, laughing the next. It is this human element that lies at the film's core and makes it sing. The film only loosely fictionalises the original events, but this untethering yields a story that is all the more real. Eddie Marsan, in the Q&A afterwards, admits, "when I read it, I realised it wasn't really a heist movie. It was a movie about prejudice. The two men hate each other and have a prejudicial opinion of each other, and they must transcend that in order to save something precious to them. That's fascinating to me as an actor and as a human being." Ditto, Eddie. Ditto.
As the audience filters out, buzzing with satisfaction and intrigue, we seem in agreement that No Ordinary Heist is a grounded and atypical take on the heist genre that rewards its audience not with popcorn thrills but a very genuine human story. Returning once again in the February rain, I am reminded of the words of Richard Walter, a UCLA screenwriting professor. "To what do you owe the source material? Nothing. You owe the audience a really great movie."
No Ordinary Heist screened at Dublin International Film Festival on 22nd February, and is released in cinemas on 27th March 2026.
