Imagine a blend of Snatch, Ocean's 11 and The Italian Job. Then juxtapose the staples of the caper genre with real events involving national security and high-level corruption, and the result is The Bank Job.
Well-paced, smartly told and unpretentious, this solid British heist thriller also has moments of invention and imagination.
The story is based on a 1971 London break-in where a band of inept thieves tunneled into a branch of Lloyds Bank and made off with the contents of its vault, valued at more than 3 million pounds. During the course of the robbery, a ham radio operator happened upon walkie-talkie communications between the robbers and a lookout. Authorities were summoned and the story was splashed across all the British news outlets. While the robberycaptured the attention of the public, it just as quickly disappeared. Covert machinations led to a surprising conclusion.
The film artfully re-creates the era, with political and sexual scandals serving as a backdrop to the criminal activity. But after the heist, the tone abruptly changes from breezy to dark. And some of the dialogue (written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, so clever in Flushed Away) sounds wooden. Several characters feel more like caricatures than real people.
Jason Statham (Transporter) plays Terry, a working-class tough with a car dealership and a wife and two young daughters. But don't mistake him for an upright working stiff: He owes money to thugs and knows his way around the seediest strip clubs. Terry is approached by former flame, Martine (Saffron Burrows), who has a plan to break into the bank and make off with cash and jewels. But Martine has been secretly assigned by MI5 operatives to nab something the government deems far more valuable — incriminating photos of a randy royal tucked inside a safe deposit box.
There are the requisite scenes of assembling the gang, drawing up plans, drilling and tunneling, and the expected bumbling by a gang of thieves who are in over their heads.
But it's not all formula. Along the way we also meet a porn king, a spokesman for black power who also is a pimp and extortionist, a hippie undercover spy and a lord with kinky predilections.
How much of the goings-on are true is murky. But at least the cast is diverse, and predictability is kept to a minimum. The Bank Job is a brisk tale of corruption, sexual scandal, thievery and murder, jauntily told.
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