Solon Economou

Movie Review--The Bank Job

Every now and then an intelligent, well-written, well-acted, and well-directed movie comes along.  "The Bank Job," available on DVD, is one of them.  This one will hold your interest from opening credits to the final outcome.

"The Bank Job" is based on the 1971 robbery of Lloyd's Bank in London, which was carried out by a bunch of second-rate, smalltime crooks.  It stars Jason Statham, who was also featured in "The Italian Job" and in the "Transporter" series, but don't hold the latter against him.  This one's a serious movie about some very serious goings-on.

An old neighborhood friend and model with some government connections, played by the beautiful Saffron Burrows, approaches Statham and lets him in on a tightly held secret.  The Lloyd's Bank on Baker Street (Shades of Sherlock Holmes!) is completely overhauling its security system, which will be totally inoperable for a week.  She suggests he get a gang together and they tunnel under the vault and relieve its safe deposit boxes of their treasure over the weekend.

He gathers a gang of second-raters like himself and they actually tunnel under and up into the vault and do the job.  The police are going insane.  They can hear them talking back and forth on their hand-held radios, but they don't know which bank it is that's being robbed.  Remarks like "Look at this necklace!" and "There's gold bars here!" don't give them a clue, so they send police cars out to all the banks to look through the windows and check the areas. 

Everything looks copacetic everywhere because they've tunneled in from under, and the bank looks as it should.  The police even collect the bank manager, who lets them into the Lloyd's bank ,and ask him to open the vault.  He says, "I can't.  It's on a time lock."  All the while the crooks are on the other side of the vault door.

They take the loot and run.  Have I told you too much?  End of story?  No.  Then it starts to get good.

Britain's MI5 or MI6 or MI17.b (I can hardly tell the difference anymore) is in on it.  Also, safe deposit boxes of some very unsavory characters, who are not squeamish at murder or sadistic torture, are also in the game.

You'll have to see the movie for the rest. 

The end credits disclose that almost 4,000,000 pounds of loot was stolen, more than that of the famous 3,000,000 mail robbery.  Surprisingly, out of the myriad safe deposit box holders victimized, only 100 came forth to make any claims on their losses.  Hmmm.  Those Brits aren't as up-and-up as you thought, are they?