These bits of fanciful puzzle-solving make the rest of the movie, a self-consciously derivative riff on staples like Ocean's 11 and The Italian Job, feel a bit uninspired.
The film presents safecracking as a quasi-romantic, supernatural performance.
The special effects team and director Matthias Schweighöfer, who also stars as the gifted safecracker Ludwig Dieter, make the inner-workings of these objects, named after German composer Richard Wagner's Ring cycle according to the movie's convoluted backstory, look like miniature steampunk planets. In these brief scenes, bits of metal click together, gears grind, and cylinders fall exactly into place. The best moments in Netflix's Army of Thieves, an oddly slight heist-centric prequel to Zack Snyder's gargantuan Vegas bloodbath Army of the Dead, mostly involve the camera sliding through the interlocking mechanisms of various comically elaborate safes that need cracking.
