Documentary Review: This is a Robbery - The World's Biggest Art Heist

Available to watch now on Netflix.

This is a Robbery is a new Netflix documentary about the art heist that took place on St Patrick’s Day in March 1990 at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Until recently it was the largest museum robbery in terms of price, with the estimated value in the late 2000s sitting at US$600 million (in 1990 it was valued at US$200 million). 

Edouard Manet - Chez Tortoni

It’s a fascinating four part documentary which takes you through the events of the night, the suspects and the evidence the police have. Each of the episodes are just under an hour long. Although it comes to no conclusions, it’s well worth a watch just to hear the events that surrounded the robbery. I had no previous knowledge of these events, so in the first episode I was shocked to hear everything that happened. At the same time I was devastated to learn that these works of art still haven’t been returned 30 years later and potentially have been lost to the world forever. 

My favourite episode was the first one, just to hear the details of the robbery including each of the items they’d taken and which rooms they went to. I became my inner detective and started theorising about why they had chosen these particular works of art and the rooms they’d gone to. Then it begins to go into the suspects and connections to The Mob and I began to lose interest. I still watched eagerly but it didn’t hold my attention as much as the first episode and I got confused with how they were getting the connections between each member of the mob, especially in the final episode. 

In a few weeks time I’ll be doing a more in depth blog post about the actual heist itself so keep an eye out for that.