Being a pickpocket ain’t what it used to be. In Charles Dickens’ day, it meant scrabbling for survival in dim slums and suffocating warrens, suffering abuse and manipulation by sinister taskmasters, running from the coppers. Nowadays, aside from the occasional bump, it’s like a vacation – strolling the sunny streets looking cool and dapper, your own man, beholden to no one except the pals you work with, sometimes raking in $10,000 in time to knock off before lunch, and doing it all with a smile on your face and a lift in your step.

At least that’s true if we believe Johnnie To’s long-awaited Sparrow. The comedy-thriller about a four-man team of five-finger-discount specialists was reportedly three years in the making (off and on, of course – it’s not as if the ever-prolific To stopped making other films). It’s a little difficult to see why – Sparrow seems more a casual lark than the Wong Kar Wai-esque statement of an obsessive artisan. Maybe a guy like To finds the illusion of being laid-back harder to achieve than that of total control. In the event, he pulls it off fairly well, although not with complete success.

Sparrow is self-consciously frothy from the first scene, one of a handful where it feels like To is scratching an itch to make an old-fashioned musical. The movie’s main character, Kei (Simon Yam), almost starts hoofing it on the walls and ceiling like Fred Astaire as he rises to head out for work and finds the eponymous avian visitor flitting through his window. (You can tell right from the start that caged birds will be a metaphor for one of the characters, but fortunately the movie doesn’t belabour this hackneyed symbol too much.)

From there, the bouncy vibe continues for most of the first hour, which half-disguises urban Hong Kong as a backlot Riviera in some archly Gallic caper flick – I kept wanting a wearily romantic French male singer like Charles Aznavour to burst out on the soundtrack. To and so many other local crime storytellers have made the city’s shadowy, claustrophobic alleys, parking garages and back rooms into a mythical otherworld; here, refreshingly, he picks locations that are light-coloured and airy – especially broad outdoor staircases - and gives them lots of sunshine and breezes.

There, he stages nifty pickpocketing scenes with his four heroes (who also include Gordon Lam Ka-Tung, Law Wing-Cheong and Kenneth Cheung) that split the difference between dance routines and kung fu or gun duels. The profession’s weapon of choice, razor blades used to slice open pockets, are fetishized a little like the shiny firearms in previous To works. It’s in fact slightly perplexing and frustrating that, having gone to the trouble to devise the elaborate choreography of these passages, To doesn’t give us at least one more big one – the film’s tight running time could have accommodated it.

The insouciant air in this section of the movie is nice, but not always entirely convincing, sometimes straining self-consciously for the effect. Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril’s score in particular tries too hard, often acting as a big sign reading in block letters, “THIS BIT HERE IS WHIMSICAL AND CHARMING.” Sometimes it’s true, but if you have to point it out…

Sparrow is loosey-goosey enough that the plot per se doesn’t really kick in until the movie is something like half over, with Lam, Law and Cheung deciding, against Yam’s protests, to use their skills to help free sad Triad moll Chung Chun-Lei (Kelly Lin) from her (ahem) gilded cage. The development has a salutary effect on the film: the third act deepens the mood with a melancholy undercurrent and a sense of danger. To gets to start painting in his more accustomed palate of velvety blue-black with a silvery sheen, and lets the characters deliver some small surprises, handled with his typical, wonderful terseness.

Best of all, it leads up to an enchanted climactic setpiece – I almost typed “production number” - with a stylized pickpocket battle royale that functions partly as an unlikely homage to Singin’ in the Rain (here Jamaux and Avril’s music really gets the job done). This is textbook To, another example of why he’s currently considered the maestro of Hong Kong popular cinema in so much of the world.

One could be justified for feeling that Sparrow isn’t much to show for three years of work. Ultimately, it’s just a sunny side up version of To’s more escapist noir programmers - especially 2006’s Exiled, with which it would make a good double feature. A criminal fraternity indulges in male bonding and esoteric codes of honour, while a pretty woman waits at the edge of the frame, her lip trembling and eyes moist. And at the end it all melts on your tongue like candy floss. But with so much of the industry’s current output leaving an aftertaste like too-greasy fried chicken, that’s a small gift – and you know what one says about gift horses...

Michael Wells