Both adorable and tragic, funny and futile, this is the true story of Attila Ambrus, a Romanian man born in 1967, in the midst of the Soviet Eastern Block. In the 1980s, searching for work, Mr. Ambrus escaped across the border into Hungary and eventually landed several jobs, but none so lucrative as his bank heists which eventually earned him nearly half a million US dollars. His flair, combined with his seemingly miraculous ability to avoid the fumbling, newly post-Communist police, made him a Hungarian sensation. And all this while he was the rather ineffectual third-string goaltender on one of Hungary's more moribund professional ice hockey teams.
An escape artist who could only rob while drunk, Mr. Ambrus is, often, a source of astonishment and hilarity, but there's an underlying cord of sadness here which sometimes surfaces through Mr. Rubinstein's account. Why would a true thief require seemingly the consumption of whole bottles of whiskey to enable him to execute his crimes? Does this not smack rather of desperation? A starving man provoked by poverty to better himself in a world that makes the common man's success exceedingly difficult...
It is this fundamental humanity which makes Ambrus so as sympathetic to us as he clearly is to his Hungarian fans. His is a tragedy of Communism, told with a wink and a grin. (4/5 Stars)
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