The Bank Job

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

The Bank Job is a surprisingly intricate and entertaining heist movie, so it's a shame that the generic title will most likely fail to compel people into their seats. Based on a true story of an unsolved 1971 bank robbery, it stars the ever-reliable Jason Statham as a small-time crook surrounded by a wide array of London lowlifes, corrupt cops, British Intelligence agents, and even a porn kingpin.

The main twist is that the titular bank job ends about halfway through the film, and what follows is a very complicated aftermath. The thieves' plan was to rob the safety deposit boxes of an upscale vault, assuming that none of the victims would want to reveal what was stolen. They assumed correctly: as one woman complains to the police, "the whole point of a safety deposit box is that people like you don’t know what’s in it!"

Unfortunately for the thieves, it also opened up an enormous can of worms. From the public point of view of the real-life robbery, there was a lot of media coverage for a few days, and then the stories abruptly stopped as a result of a mysterious government gag order. As The Bank Job tells it, that was because among the things stolen were incriminating pictures of Princess Margaret, hid by a radical black-power curiosity named Michael X (a real guy, played here by Peter De Jersey) with blackmail on his mind. MI-6 agents (led by Richard Lintern) are rushed in to recover the photos – or did they actually orchestrate the robbery to get the photos out of Michael X's hands?

Yep, there's lots of intrigue – and I haven't even gotten into the part about the "Soho Porn King" Lew Vogel (David Suchet), who needs to recover stolen safety deposit materials of his own, or Saffron Burrows, the femme fatale of the piece who convinces Statham to do the robbery, possibly or possibly not on the orders of the MI-6 agent played by Lintern. As the press notes like to point out, Statham and his gang of thieves are probably the most innocent pawns in the story.

Statham is the right choice to lead this kind of ensemble enterprise; he looks lower-class enough to be able to pull off his characters, but he's roguish enough to be an entertaining lead. (Okay, that could describe all of Statham's roles, but hey, the guy is good at what he does.) The rest of the cast matches that charm, but the nature of the story means we're dealing with a lot of one-dimensional characters who can be easily identified. The exception is Burrows,