Their plan wasn’t exactly a work of art. It was a stroke of genius. But now the perfect crime is turning into a perfect disaster in this madcap comedy featuring Academy Award winners Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, Marcia Gay Harden and Academy Award nominee William H. Macy. Charles, Roger and George are the very picture of honest security guards. But when they learn their favorite artworks are being sent to another museum, they concoct a plan to switch the real masterpieces with fakes. All goes well until a mistake forces these first-time thieves into a last-minute escapade in the comedy caper that proves you’re never too old to have some new fun.Any movie starring Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, William H. Macy, and Marcia Gay Harden carries with it the expectation of good things, and The Maiden Heist does not disappoint. Roger (Walken), Charlie (Freeman), and George (Macy) are all guards at a Boston art museum. Each has one piece to which he is virtually addicted; Roger waxes rhapsodic about a (fictional) 19th-century post-naturalist painting called “The Lovely Maiden,” referring to the subject’s “desperate longing and overwhelming passion,” while Charlie loves another painting and night guard George likes to strip off his clothes and pose like his favorite statue after hours. When the three learn that the insufferable young curator plans to sell the three works (and others) to a Danish museum, replacing them with depictions of animal genitalia and similar atrocities, they are inconsolable. They consider moving to Denmark, which doesn’t sit too well with Roger’s wife (Harden), who has her heart set on a vacation trip to sunny Florida. But George, a tightly wound former Marine (he took part in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada), has an alternative plan: arrange to have replicas of the pieces made, and then replace the real ones with the fakes during the move. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that complications will ensue. The heist itself is poorly planned, to say the least, and quickly turns into a fiasco; but these are likable characters (as the tag line says, “They’re not bad guys–just bad thieves”), and, well, everything will probably turn out OK. Directed by Peter Hewitt, The Maiden Heist is unlikely to pose a threat to Citizen Kane as one of the great moments in cinematic history, but it has a light touch, a great cast, and plenty of charm. Bonus material includes a “making of” featurette and audio commentary. –Sam Graham

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