The Quarantine Stream: ‘This Is A Robbery’ Investigates ‘The World’s Biggest Art Heist’
By Chris Evangelista/April 21, 2021 9:00 am EST
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as cops entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the guards, and proceeded to make off with a haul that’s estimated to be worth somewhere around $500 million. And then…nothing. Art theft is a curious thing – if you steal works that are so well-known you can’t really do much with them. Flipping them for a profit is hard, and it’s not exactly like you can hang the stuff up on your own wall and act like it belongs there.
And thus, the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist has been all but impossible to solve. This might be a big red flag for some viewers because a lot of streaming services – especially Netflix – keep pumping out these true crime shows where there’s no real resolution. An unsolved mystery can be tantalizing – there’s an entire show called Unsolved Mysteries, after all – but devoting multiple parts to one unsolved crime can be frustrating.
Beyond that, This Is a Robbery has a lot of fun with the local color – lots of folks here have thick Boston accents, and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Ben Affleck decides to turn this into a feature film. If you’re looking for closure, This Is a Robbery is not for you. But if you want to get engrossed in an interesting story of great art that has up and vanished, this is well worth checking out.
