‘This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist’ Review: Not as Good as an Afternoon in an Actual Museum

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of spending an afternoon in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Evans Street, you may have noticed a handful of empty frames or strangely blank spaces on the gallery walls. These are the last traces of 13 pieces of art stolen on the night of Saint Patrick’s Day in 1990. To this day, none of the pieces have ever been found, no one has been formally charged for the heist, and the Gardner Museum website still lists a $10 million reward guaranteed to anyone who locates the missing art. This crime lies at the center of Netflix’s new limited series “This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist.” Produced over the course of seven years, the four-episode show aims to shed light on the 31-year-old mystery.

The Gardner Heist involves many strange details that make for a compelling mystery. The robbery was committed in an unprecedented 81 minutes, while most robberies are over in less than 10. A night watchman (who was later cleared by the FBI) deviated from normal museum security protocols on the night of the heist. One of the missing pieces came from a gallery room whose motion sensors were only activated by patrolling guards, but never the thieves. Some of the paintings — priceless pieces of art by artists like Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet — were brutally sliced from their frames instead of being removed normally. Other stolen pieces were worth barely any money. Unfortunately, the bizarre facts of the robbery are not enough to keep the series’ four nearly hour-long episodes engaging.

With this limited series, Netflix seems to be chasing the popularity of the murder miniseries “The Staircase” (added to Netflix in 2018) with limited success. “The Staircase” draws much of its tension from the gruesome nature of its central crime — an alleged murder of a spouse. No matter how much theory and suspicion surrounds the Gardner case, it ultimately boils down to a simple robbery entwined in a complicated web of organized crime. The limited series has too slow a pace for a story that’s bogged down in so many names and details.

The penultimate episode, especially, suffers from this. At the heart of the Gardner mystery is Boston’s deep history with both Irish and Italian mobs and organized crime, and the series goes to painstaking lengths to trace out an investigation of its many key players. This depth of explanation is detrimental to the series. It takes enough effort and focus to keep track of all the names being thrown around; to have them all come out with no real resolution feels almost insulting. It’s like finishing a marathon only to find out that the prize was a round of applause and not a gold medal. Even discussions of sightings of the paintings fail to move the pace along or add intrigue, since so much of the story seems to be unverifiable.

The series is well shot, has very clear and clean graphic design, and does an effective job of making Boston’s history approachable. Anyone interested in the Gardner Heist or anyone off-campus and desperately homesick for Cambridge will appreciate the shots of Boston streets, landmarks, and interior shots of the museum. There’s even a few shots of Harvard Square itself. But if given the chance, they might be better off watching only the first episode before wandering off to the Gardner Museum itself rather than consuming the remaining three hours of the series. An afternoon of asking employees or museum visitors what they think happened would garner just as many concrete answers as the limited series, and weave at least as rich a picture of Boston’s history.