The Bank Job
Count me among those who thought Jason Statham would never ascend beyond the one-dimensional, dull-faced action knucklehead role he inherited from Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Amazing what some decent material can do, because I doubt he'll ever surpass this level of quality again. The Bank Job has all the ingredients for a first-rate thriller: a career criminal gone straight but desperate for cash; a femme fatal who come to him with the score of a lifetime; a counter-culture revolutionary blackmailing the royal family; and a shady government agent manipulating the whole affair. Even better is that it's based on the real-life Baker Street robbery of 1971 (at the time, the largest heist in British history), the details of which remained sealed in classified government files until a few years before The Bank Job was written, and of which many details still remain classified.
The favorite, and certainly most fascinating theory (the one the movie goes with), holds that a Black Power militant named Michael X possessed compromising photos of one of Princess Margaret's many alleged sexual trysts and tried to blackmail the British government into laying off his illegal operations. Those photos were allegedly kept in a safe-deposit box in said bank, and MI-5 indirectly hired the thieves to rob it, delivering the photos and keeping whatever else they could carry.
Statham handles the role of the suspicious but desperate ring leader
of the bank robbers as deftly as he can, helped by a better than
average script and sharp supporting cast, especially the always
fetching Saffron Burrows as the former flame who gets him into this
predicament. The Bank Job is a fairly rote thriller, but its
watchable cast, detailed recreation of 1970s London and admittedly
stretched credulity make it an above average entry in the criminal
thriller genre.
- July 28, 2009
DVD Extras
Sloppy featurettes about the truth behind the real robbery which
further confuse things instead offering any interesting insight,
spoiling a great opportunity to explore actual events that inspired
that movie.