Christmas is a time of tables laid with lavish servings of turkey and lashings of cranberry sauce. Of trees heaving with fairy lights and baubles, with scores of presents gathered around like Victorian urchins warming themselves by a lit brazier. Of Hollywood encouraging you to take your shot with Keira Knightley. In other words, it’s a time of rampant consumerism. Sky Max’s The Heist Before Christmas is something of a tonic, then: a Christmas movie for the underserved market in underserved Christmases.
“How’s things at home, Mikey?” asks his headmaster, after Mikey (Bamber Todd) is caught, yet again, causing trouble at his Northern Irish primary school. Things aren’t great. Single mother Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to put food on the table, while her youngest son, Sean (Joshua McLees), is clinging on to the last vestiges of childlike naivety. Their Christmas plans become inextricably tangled up with those of a bank robber (James Nesbitt), who is on the lam in a Santa suit, and Santa himself (Timothy Spall), who young Mikey encounters laid up in the woods following an apparent sleigh crash. With both the police and Christmas Day closing in, what lessons are going to be learnt by this unusual quartet?
