Done right, the kind of movie that The Bank Job strives to be can be the most fun to watch: a combination of a jovial crime movie with historical conspiracies. It is obviously a fictional yarn and a heavily stylized one at that, but it links the fiction with the true events (including real people) to create this conjecture on what exactly happened behind England's mysterious Walkie-Talkie Robbery that is pretty darn amusing.
True story: in 1971, a group of tunneling thieves raided a bank vault, getting away with loot that's speculated to total around 4 million pounds, while a ham radio operator accidentally listened in on their walkie-talkie conversation during the heist. Despite the robbery making front-page headlines the first day, any news about it completely disappeared after only 3 days. A D-Notice—basically a government gag order to the media for matters of national security—was issued for this seemingly random robbery… but why? What's with the secrecy? No one knows for so many years, but The Bank Job is going to reveal the "truth" at long last. Of course, there's no proof to any of this, so it's more "inspired by a true story" than "based on a true story."
Screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais supposedly stumbled onto a hot tip from a person who may or may not be one of the original bank robbers, and uncovered a political conspiracy that involved members of the Royal Family. Juicy, no? Interestingly, the movie covers up the identity of the people still alive—which includes the robbers guilty of the heist—but has no problem naming names when it comes to the famous ones. Who else are involved?
Let's see what else was going on at the time: there was civil unrest, and in Britain the biggest black militant group was the one controlled by pimp/drug-pusher Michael X, who famously had ways of dodging prosecution (one of them was his close friendship with John Lennon, who kept bailing him out of jail, but The Bank Job ignored that fact). The movie hypothesizes that Michael X was in possession of illicit photographs showing Princess Margaret's scandalous sex party in the Caribbeans. He stored it in a bank vault and threatened to release it to the press if he's ever incarcerated. Spy agency MI5, of course, deployed a ploy to get those photos without implicating themselves, by using a group of small-time saps headed by the fictional Terry Leather (Jason Statham), who was tricked into robbing the bank without even knowing that he's being used to steal those photos for the government. The movie doesn't stop just there, though. Just to keep things even wilder, the same bank vault just happens to be where The Porn King of Soho keeps a ledger detailing his payments to crooked cops, and where a brothel owner keeps compromising photos of powerful politicians. Now these gobsmacked small-fry thieves are forced to fend themselves against the mob, corrupt cops, a militia, and government spooks.
With so many sides to portray and over a dozen characters to cover—each with their own agenda—The Bank Job is full of one-note characters, but that's part of the fun. The whole film is like a chess game, with different people in different class levels all moving towards the same goal, taking each other out along the way.
Here Jason Statham doesn't play the brash action hero he's usually typecast as; Terry Leather is more of a dramatic role, where he plays both tender leader and family man. Of course, he's still a tough guy type, so it's not like he's playing something against type. You can bet your ass that they're not going to cast him if he doesn't get his Transporter moment towards the end.
Half heist movie and half political thriller, a big part of the film\'s coolness is in seeing the pieces fit. It\'s pretty creative (and plausible, though unlikely) how the film ties the infamous robbery to the murder of Gale Anne Benson. There\'s really not a lot to go on with the heist itself, and even the deal-breaking that follows don\'t involve a lot of twists and turns, so the film relies mostly on the fun of seeing the street-level crooks clash with political higher-ups. Playing like some kind of Ocean\'s Eleven meets JFK meets Snatch, The Bank Job keeps things light without resorting to outright stupidity.
"The Bank Job" opens March 7, 2008 and is rated R. Drama, Thriller. Directed by Roger Donaldson. Written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais. Starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays, James Faulkner.
