The Bank Job (**½)

Directed By: Roger Donaldson (The Recruit, Thirteen Days, Dante’s Peak, Species, The Getaway, Cocktail)
Starring: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore
Seen: August 9th 2008

**½ Out of ****

The “true” story of a group of small-time conmen conned into going for the big one, and mostly surviving it. The story is based on the Baker Street robbery in central London in 1971, of which the stolen items and valuables were never recovered. The story took 37 years to be produced as a film because of a government gag request put in place to protect a prominent member of the British royal family.

Malcolm X, an influential black militant is using photographs of the aforementioned prominent member of the British royal family of an unsavoury nature to keep himself out of jail, in fact, away from any kind of legal suspicion. Since he keeps threatening to release the photos, MI5 decides to find a way to get the photographs without implicating themselves.

Step up Martine (Saffron Burrows), freshly caught smuggling heroin into Britain. MI5 has worked up a deal with her to get a team together to procure the photographs, which is located in safety deposit box 118 in the bank. She gets Terry Leather (Statham) involved, and after some convincing (but ot much, since he has debt “problems” of his own, he decides to assist Martine, not knowing the true reason Martine wants to rob the bank. So terry hires a group of petty-criminal friends, and they hire a shop two shops away from the bank and start digging – all the while having a look-out on a building across the street, alerting them whenever someone comes near the shop.

What they don’t know is that a local amateur radio operator has caught wind of their operation, and has alerted the police. This now sends the police into quite the amusing chase after possible sites for the robbery – since they never mention the name of the bank. The robbery does have its snags, but the presentation on film was very entertaining and very suspenseful at times. Some scenes come across quite brutal – especially a torture scene involving an acetylene torch.

The attention to detail is beautiful, and everything is early 70’s down to a tee. I’ve even heard talk of pubic wigs for true authenticity, I kid you not. Overall this is a very entertaining film, but not really for the very squeamish, and also not for those who only enjoy modern capers since this is, after all, a period piece adventure film. I would recommend it if you do not have much else to do, it’s fun, and it’s definitely quite entertaining.