The Bank Job

Surprisingly based on a true story, The Bank Job follows a group of amateur crooks who find themselves positioned as pawns in a series of political manoeuvres. MI5 up-and-comer Tim Everett (Richard Linten) is on a mission to retrieve highly incriminating photographs from a local bank vault, but the catch is that he can not leave behind any trace of his involvement. He operates through the street-savvy Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), and she’s the one who seductively lures Terry Leather (Jason Statham) and his friends out of small-time crime and into serious business. Throw in a Trinidadian thug, a manipulative bordello owner and a handful of corrupt police, and things are bound to get a little complicated. Full kudos are due to the screenwriters for negotiating this twisted storyline with such skill and flexibility. The Bank Job will sweep you up and into this fantastically convoluted journey, and yet it retains that rare ability to make an audience laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of its narrative.

Roger Donaldson’s directing is pitch-perfect. His last cinematic effort, The World’s Fastest Indian, was bloated by its own sense of self-importance, and was all about the heavy emotional scores, trite dialogue and tear-jerking character developments. Donaldson seems much more comfortable back in the action genre, working with a film that refreshingly operates under no such false pretences. From its title to final credits, The Bank Job is unashamedly a heist film, and we’re all the better for it. The characters are all recognisable (Tim Everett channels something of James Bond and every archetypical villain is present in full form), but somehow they become all the more enjoyable in their supposed realism. And, even though these criminals lack the pure charisma of Danny Ocean and co., there’s something quite amiable about their never-ending blundering and that manages to keep us on their side the whole way through. This is heist the way it should be; tense, yet not without a sense of fun.