The Jewel Thief (2023) Movie Review – Catch him if you can

Catch him if you can

Gerald Blanchard has been committing robbery since the 1980’s. He made a good life for himself doing so; that is until “the world’s most ingenious thief” started to slip up.

The Hulu original documentary, The Jewel Thief, hit the streamer this week, and it highlights Gerald’s rise to the robbery lifestyle and how he lived a very “Catch Me If You Can” lifestyle for most of the time he was doing so. 

At a run time of 100 minutes, the documentary spends the first 40 of it giving us a lot of backstory into the rise of Blanchard’s crime spree of robbery. It’s portrayed in a very innocent and somewhat comedic way.

Blanchard was born in Canada and moved to Omaha, Nebraska. He began robbing electronic stores as a teenager, and despite being arrested multiple times, he would go right back out and rob.

Eventually, Blanchard would upgrade to scoping out new bank branches being built. He would sneak in as a construction worker and learn the blueprints of the building before making his move to rob the ATM’s before the bank would even officially open. Blanchard never feared being caught.

During one of his many arrests, he snuck out of an interrogation room through the air ducts in the ceiling. These tactics sound unrealistic, and it seems like director Landon Van Soest wants us to feel that way. There are moments in the film where Gerald describes stories of his robberies and evasions of the police one way, and other interviews describe them another way.

It’s in the interviews with Blanchard that he gives off a jarring vibe. He’s entertaining, but the audience is not meant to like him. He came from a single-parent household, but it never really seemed like he turned to crime because of poverty. Eventually, his acts of thievery never reverted back to those motivations. He was a bit of a nerd who was good at robbery.

When Blanchard eventually has it all. He marries, travels the world, and commits his pricey crimes of cash and high-end sho lifting. He sends pictures of him living the high life to detectives who are on his trail. 

All of this eventually led up to Blanchard spotting his mega heist, a diamond and pearl jewel called The Star Empress Sisi, from a case inside Vienna’s Schonbrun Palace. Again, there is confusion for the viewer as to how he pulls this off. It’s mentioned that Blanchard was going to parachute in, but that is dismissed as a myth.

Blanchard doesn’t say much because he was arrested for it in Canada and pleaded guilty to possession and not theft. If he said anymore on the matter on camera, he could be extradited to Austria. How he actually got into the museum isn’t clear, but Blanchard did swap the jewel with a replica from the gift shop that sat in the original’s place for some time. 

It’s from there that his downfall begins. It’s mentioned throughout the film that Blanchard’s crime never hurt anyone. He robbed the banks money, not ours; he stole appliances from big-name stores, not people’s homes. In the interview for the film, Blanchard mentions that he never gets violent, but if he’s put in a corner he would retaliate.

His smile turns cold after he says it. After the jewel heist, he begins to slip up. He’s overworked by his organized crime bosses, and he loses his cool easier. Blanchard, who had over twenty aliases, rented a car under his name, which then gave detectives the chance to wiretap his phone and track him. Eventually, authorities made a move on him. 

Landon Van Soest gives the documentary some fun tones. Like his main subject, it’s comical how this man handled his crimes, but in a flash it can switch to being slightly sinister. Although his crimes were believed to be mostly harmless to people, Blanchard does have a darkness to him.

There aren’t any real glorifying moments for him in the movie, even though it seems like Blanchard is getting off on telling his stories, which conveniently leaves out major details. The Jewel Thief is a well-made, tight crime documentary that makes its subject look ingenious, but never anywhere close to the level of an anti-hero.