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THE BANK JOB Send This Review to a Friend
Based on a real incident, this is the best heist tale to come along in some time. Director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have pumped up their imagination to expand what is known of the 1970s London robbery with a supposed motive and situation involving the government. What the gang of thieves think is purely a monetary caper is depicted as really an effort by the British secret service to retrieve compromising photographs involving sexual escapades of Princess Margaret from a safety deposit box. Before the affair is resolved, all hell breaks loose, not only for the robbers, but for a notable with a taste for S and M and officials on the take who also have secreted valuable records in the same bank vault that contains the embarrassing photographs.
Jason Statham stars as Terry, a car dealer who has background that makes him susceptible to getting involved in the plan to break into the vault of one of Britain’s prestigious banks located on Baker Street. His motive is to get enough loot to solve the financial problems of his family. But he is being manipulated by Saffron Burrows as Martine, who has been a successful model but who now is being pressed into doing the dirty work of the government. She has the mission of snatching the photographs.
The incriminating pictures have been placed there by a black power leader with his own agenda. Everyone has something to lose or gain in the operation. The film’s power lies in the ability to etch the assortment of characters, all well cast, and the authentic atmosphere created, along with the necessary tension and suspense that must be mounted. “The Bank Job” is thoroughly involving, and whatever credibility can be challenged, it retains the mark of a good, slick dose of entertainment.
The real bank job became known as “the walkie-talkie robbery” because it was discovered while in progress by someone who stumbled into listening to the conversations on walkie-talkies between the burglars. The fact that the robbery went off the front pages of the newspapers so quickly aroused suspicions of cover-up. Savvy filmmakers know what to do with such suspicions. A Lionsgate release.
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