The Bank Job
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Bank Job
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I love heist movies, they are my second biggest guilty pleasure after monster movies truth to be told. There is something so intriguing about a bunch of ordinary men trying to break the rules and earn some quick bucks. So when I came upon The Bank Job a few years ago, I was really interested in watching it. I don't recall any heist movie as of late that has let me down, maybe just the one with Robert de Niro and Edward Norton called The Score. Everything else like the Ocean's movies, The Italiah Job (which has nothing to do with this film by the way), they have been satisfying films worthy of the title "popcorn flicks". They don't have to be Oscar-worthy, or filled with an all-star cast or snappy dialogues. All you need is a clever script, a good heist, and a bunch of twist and turns towards the end of the film to keep me entertained. The Bank Job is not only a heist movie, it is a British heist movie completed with British accents and British vulgarities - which I love. Besides, it features one of the best looking bald man ever - Jason Statham. Let's admit it, nobody cares if he is balding at the back of his head.
The Bank Job opens with a sex scene, an important one that is really the pivotal moment to the whole film. Based on a true story that happened in 1971, a certain royalty was caught having sex with two other men in a hotel room by a drug lord who calls himself Michael X. He was later arrested by the authorities in England, but they cannot do anything to him because he has the pictures stashed in the vault of a local bank, and would threaten to release those pictures if anything is being done against his interest. So the government needs someone to get into that vault, steal those pictures without that someone knowing that the government has anything to do with it with the whole operation. When a ex-model, Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), is found with drugs in her suitcase at the airport, the only way for her to clear her name was to work for Tim Everett (Richard Lintern), the man in charge of finding a team to rob the bank. Through Martine, he managed to recruit a group of ordinary men who wish to do something extraordinary, despite the obvious lack of experience. Leading the pack was Terry Leather (Jason Statham), along with a couple of his best "mates" to pull off the job, despite not knowing the true reason behind their robbery.
The trailer to this film is misleading in the sense that it gives you an illusion that this film is going to be one of those happy-go-lucky heist movies about how a bunch of amateurs getting away with their million-dollar loots. At least that has been the cast for most of the heist movies these days, just a fun ride with a lot of money involved. The Bank Job, however, is quite different from what you see in the trailer because the main plot of the story is actually quite dark, filled with political conspiracies and whatnot. This film focuses not so much on the heist itself for the most part, but the aftermath of the heist and how it affects the team of robbers. One negative aspect of the film was probably how the director failed to grasp whether or not he wanted this film to be a feel-good movie or one that is dark and grim. In the end, you get the first half of the film being a comedy, while the second half feeling like the edited footage right out of The Godfather or some random mob film. The confusion in style was something that I had to get used to especially after the politics started to kick it, but the pace of the film kept the excitement level high, not to mention the score for this film helped with the adrenaline as well.
What this film accomplished was to weave together a series of different subplots into a neat stack. That is to say, when dealing with multiple story lines intertwined with one another, a lot of filmmakers either compromise on one of them, or fail to tell both stories very well altogether. More often than not, one plot would be given more emphasis than the other, causing the plot to cancel each other out and the audience left detached from the film altogether. The Bank Job, however, very successfully weaved together a couple of plots and produced a film that is surprisingly cohesive. Everything from the planning of the heist, to the execution of the heist, the getaway, the political aspect of the film, the intervention of the pornography filmmakers, everything was done right in my opinion.
The film does not deploy the kind of twists you would expect from a heist film, at least a conventional one these days. It is pretty straight forward, and the point of this film isn't really about how they get into the vault, but how they get out of the tight situations that came swiftly after. The aftermath of the heist involves a particularly gruesome scene which I found to be painful to watch, especially after how well the director manage to invest a lot of time in making the audience like the characters. I shall not spoil it for you guys, but let's just say even the directors of Saw are going to be very impressed with it. Not only did this film have a surprising amount of gore in that one scene, it also had a lot of nudity involved. Not that I mind, but I guess I just wasn't prepared to see full frontal nudity in a heist movie.
Performance wise, it was a decent job across the board. Saffron Burrows has a strange beauty in her I realized, and the droopy eyes did catch my attention when she first appeared on screen. But she is way too skinny, which was what turned me off a little. For better for worse, Jason Statham has been officially type-casted as the tough guy in all his movies, bringing down bad guys with a flying kick or just being on top of the game in every difficult situation. It's not a bad thing of course, since he is a joy to look at while he flies across the screen from left to right and then back again. Especially in a heist movie, you want a character which is easy for the audience to root for, and Jason Statham's character definitely is somebody you want to be on your side. The other cast members are mostly unknowns, but then that is what makes this film so refreshing in a way. Forget about Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, or other people of the Ocean's team. These no-names can rob as much money as them even if nobody knows who they are anyway.
Like I said before, this film is actually based on a true story that happened in England more than thirty years ago. Due to the fact that it involved a member of the royal family, any investigations into the case was ceased and the press was not allowed to cover the story back then. Even until this day, nobody knows what really happened during the "Walkie-Talkie Heist", or who the member of the royalty was. This film is merely an attempt to give an insight into what might have happened thirty years ago in that bank, and what happened subsequently afterwards. While this may not be the most accurate account of things, I feel that this is definitely the most entertaining and satisfying version yet.
The Bank Job is a fun movie, it doesn't try to be anything else that it isn't. Other than the strange confusion of style and the amateurish score, I have little complaints about this film. It was excited, well-paced, and very engaging throughout. The director doesn't allow the attention of the audience to falter for a minute, always keeping the tempo very high throughout even the downer scenes. Perhaps we can move on from the type of heist movies that are bigger than life, and focus on the ones that can happen in the bank around the corner right next to a fast food joint.
8.5/10
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on Saturday, April 19, 2008 at 1:35 AM.
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