The Bank Job

Review by Zachary Keith Parker

On the 19th century Baker Street, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved mysteries and helped put away criminals. In September of 1971, a mysterious group of lower echelon criminals robbed the Lloyds Bank on Baker Street, resulting in both no recoveries of the stolen three million pounds and no arrests.

The more baffling mystery of Bank Job is not why the filmmakers made it, but why the filmmakers made it to be so much of a mishmash of some comedy, loads of sex, political sleaze, some action, and relationship drama.

The story is rather complicated, and the summary here is brief for the sake of simplicity. The historically notorious Michael X has blackmail photos against the royal princess stored in a safe deposit box in Lloyds bank. The British government makes a deal with Martene Love to hire a group of robbers to enact a “fool-proof” plan to raid the entire safe deposit vault.

Led by Terry (Jason Statham), a married family man whose car dealership is failing, the robbers made themselves infamous through their daft use of walkie talkies during the robbery, for which the press nicknamed them the Walkie Talkie gang.

Complications abound for the Walkie Talkie gang as the police try to track down what bank is being robbed, photos are also taken from porn king, Lew Vogel’s, safe deposit box, and various gang members find themselves torn between loyalty to their newly gained riches versus friends and family.

The film juggles a hedonistic lifestyle with washy moral guidelines. Any semblance of Christ-like behavior is dropped hastily into the script, and therefore dropped in favor of the take-what-you-can attitude. The film's protagonists are naturally adept at posing as upright human beings, while tunneling their criminal intentions underneath an unsuspecting society.

One particular character speaks to his wife, confessing to sleeping with another woman. The man’s wife seizes him, but accepts him back with a mere acknowledgment of his love from the mouth of a bitter, deceitful woman.

Perhaps this is not the wife’s display of love overcoming a marriage destroying betrayal by a street criminal masquerading as a husband as it was hastily intended.

Furthermore, it is not just the filmmaker’s attempt at pleasing two audiences, both those who want to affirm “traditional values” and those who enjoy Hollywood’s sexual exuberance.

Actually, as Hollywood exemplifies, these audiences are the same group of people, consenting to “traditional values,” which now entails gifting your children and your strippers from the same wallet.

The film juggles its sexual entertainment and family values with the same hands but drops the ball more than it should. This conflict indicates a larger problem with the film, namely the absence of consequences to the character’s actions.

Despite their moral quandary, the movie skips it lock, stock and barrel with characters suffering no tangible consequences and just “happen” to survive their scandalous and foolish bank job.

In view of the film’s weaknesses, you could easily come up with a list of options suggesting what it wishes it could have been with Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels at the top of the list (it's not a good list to model).

In order to accept the film as it is, we have to seize upon the enjoyment of watching the acting, mostly on the parts of David Suchet as the porn boss, Peter de Jersey as Michael X, and Jason Statham as Terry.

Like Jason Statham’s career, Bank Job is a hit and miss action film without much action. The movie itself is a poser, offering to make the viewer feel good about their basic moral duties, thus undercutting any distinction in the conflict between covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. Walkie-talkie your friends: this Bank Job is not worth catching.