By Christine Meade

Fast cars, a few mastermind thieves, a beautiful girl, a computer geek, the muscle man and the explosives expert: all the ingredients needed in creating a suspenseful entertaining, yet not very original movie.

This time around, the movie is titled “The Italian Job” starring Mark Wahlberg, Edward Norton and Charlize Theron. “The Italian Job” takes you on a motorboat ride through the narrow canals of Venice, Italy, as well as a multi-vehicle chase through the city of Los Angeles. This gang of thieves led by Charlie Croker (Wahlberg) is determined to steal back the $35 million worth of gold that was stolen from them, after they went through the pains of elaborately removing it from its original location of someone’s safe in Venice.

In order to avenge the murder of their former leader and father figure, Mr. Bridger (Donald Sutherland,) they go to great measures to pursue the murderer, get back the gold, all without the use of a singe handgun. Stella (Theron), Bridger’s daughter, conveniently enters the small hodge-podge gang because of her amazing skills at breaking open safes, and involves herself in the group’s intricately planned gold heist to get back at the man who murdered her father.

The Italian Job is very reminiscent of such movies like “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Ocean’s 11,” which kept audiences rooting for the bad guys, who were really the good guys in the scheme of things. This particular version of such movies kept the audience entertained from start to finish with a slew of well-known actors ranging from Norton to Seth Green, and even rapper Mos Def.

The audience particularly enjoyed the plug for Northeastern University during the movie, when Lyle (Green) explained how he was the one who actually invented Napster, being a genius computer hack. While sleeping at his desk at Northeastern, the actual founder of Napster, Shawn Fanning, is shown sneaking up to the sleeping Lyle and stealing the disk from his computer.

The movie does provide a great ending sequence of retrieving the gold from an armored truck, hacking into the computer to control traffic lights and using the subways as their getaway roadways. This “Italian Job,” directed by F. Gary Gray, is set to hit theaters May 31.