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The
Bank Job
(2008)
The Bank Job is more than "the
true story of a heist gone wrong," it's the prime example
of a genre homage gone
wrong, and there's no right way about it. While it wants
the look and feel like a 70's era crime thriller like The
French Connection or
The Getaway , its first draft of a script, poor performances
and annoying attempts at dry humor get in the way of any tension
that might be hidden among the boredome and result in an end
product that couldn't be further from emulating the genre it
tries so hard to immitate.
The film recounts the famous 1970 Lloyd's Bank robbery in London,
in which financially troubled used car dealer Terry Leather
(Jason Statham) leads a crew of part-time thieves into the
vault of a bank to empty out the safe deposit boxes. Though his plan seems flawless, the presence of a number of dirty secrets in the vault throw the robbers into a web of deceit, corruption, and blackmail, strethcing all the way to the Royal Family itself.
While the plot alone seems like the framework for an enjoyable popcorn flick, it's actually quite misleading. When dealing with an established genre like this, it's easy to assume that the audience is already familiar with the core elements of the story, since they've seen them many times before. That's no excuse, however, for the laziness and undeniably poor filmmaking on display in The Bank Job. The complete lack of exposition and character development doesn't make for a very compelling thriller, but rather an hour and a half of confused clichées.
It's supposed to be a serious Small Time Crooks, but it's got too much
humor (and unsuccessful, inconsistant humor at that) to really work as a drama.
Instead of Woody Allen's bumbling bank robber coming away with higher social
status than he can handle Statham finds himself mixed up in a political mess
of blackmail and intrigue. The real mess of the film isn't in the plot elements,
but in the mish-mash of characters thrown together without established relationships
or motivations, and villains who don't seem to have anything to do with anything.
For example, the Terry and his female partner Martine (Saffron Burrows) have
an awkward romance which supposedly threatens his marriage, but when this love
triangle comes to a head, Terry's relationship to either woman hasn't been established
well enough for the conflict to mean anything. It's just there because it's the
kind of thing that's supposed to be in this sort of movie.
Why we're subjected to scene after scene of a British secret agent (Hattie Morahan)
attempting to infiltrate the home of Michael X (Peter De Jersey), Britain's equivalent
to America's Malcolm X (and the party trying to blackmail the Royal Family) is
still not clear to me, but even without this tangential plotline I still wouldn't
be able to say that the film was concise and entertaining. All things considered,
The Bank Job is little more than genre convention after genre
convention thrown together seemingly because the filmmakers thought it would
make the film seem more authentic to the time. But based on true events or not,
the movie feels inauthentic from start to finish.
Completely unoriginal characters cliched situation and formulaic construction.
When a genre homage works, they tend to be some of the most fun movies to watch
(think back to Kill Bill or Mars Attacks!) In this case, we have nothing entertaining, instead a feature full of completely unoriginal characters, clichéed situations, and formulaic construction. In an effort to
hearken back to an age when a heist film succeeded on the basis of its plot
and tension and not on explosions and twisty gimmicks, The Bank Job fails to live
up to the originals and even some of the recent action-packed remakes like The
Italian Job.
-Mark
Moreland
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2004-2007 Thoughtsonfilm.com |
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Director:
Roger
Donaldson
Writer: Dick
Clement & Ian La Frenais
Starring: Jason
Statham,
Distributor: Lionsgate
Runtime: 110
min
Rating: R
Release Date: March
7, 2008
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