Few phrases are more disheartening to the adventurous moviegoer than “based on a true story,” which usually ensures that dogged fidelity to the facts will take precedence over such niggling matters as dramatic shape and thematic coherence. But while The Bank Job, a period British heist flick starring Jason Statham, trumpets its this-really-happened bona fides right on the title card, the movie turns out to be less a painstaking account of known events than a freewheeling extrapolation of various salacious rumors—and all the more compelling for it.
All that’s really known for sure about the 1971 London caper that inspired the film—well-known in England as the “walkie-talkie robbery”—is that a group of amateur thieves tunneled their way into the basement vault of Lloyds Bank in Marylebone and made off with the contents of dozens of safe-deposit boxes. Police discovered the heist while it was in progress, thanks to a ham-radio operator who overheard communications between the gang and their lookout, stationed on a nearby rooftop. But they had no way of knowing which of the city’s thousand or so banks was under siege, and insufficient time and manpower to check them all.
Though arrests were eventually made, little of the booty was ever recovered, and the incident quickly and rather mysteriously vanished from news reports. This prompted speculation that items involving national security had been pilfered, and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe) have merrily woven the juiciest theories into a preposterously entertaining tapestry of scandal and intrigue, involving everything from evidence of police corruption to snapshots of Princess Margaret getting boned on some Caribbean island. In this scenario, the bank job was actually a covert op: MI5 set the heist in motion, using Statham and his gang to (unwittingly) secure crucial documents for British intelligence, with a statuesque beauty (Saffron Burrows) acting as the government’s inside man, or rather woman.
Australian expat Roger Donaldson, who directed, is nobody’s idea of a serious auteur—he’s got such blatant hackery as Cocktail and Dante’s Peak on his résumé—but he does know how to keep things moving speedily enough that you’re not inclined to dwell on plausibility. And he’s got the ideal star in Statham, who’s rapidly turning into the British equivalent of Bruce Willis: tough but sardonic, quietly amused but capable of surprising depth of feeling. The Bank Job starts off larky, mining laughs and mild tension from the novice team’s blunders; events turn increasingly grim, however, once various high-ranking politicians and lowlife thugs realize what’s been stolen, and it’s primarily Statham who makes that tricky tonal shift work. (He does get terrific support from the great David Suchet as the movie’s primary villain, a porn impresario whose civilized, all-business mien disguises a genuinely terrifying venality.)
Also, as the world gets more and more and hi-tech, period genre films inevitably pick up a little residual charm. There’s now a certain my-old-man-walked-30-miles-to-school pleasure to be found in watching a robbery that involves grimy blokes swinging pickaxes rather than bespectacled nerds tapping away at iMacs, or from a scene in which somebody desperately tries to locate a telephone. At the same time, though, The Bank Job never wallows in ’70s nostalgia; apart from one too-prominent “Free Angela Davis” poster, the era is evoked rather than underlined. Indeed, if not for the handful of recognizable actors, you could easily imagine this to be a little-remembered movie from the ’70s. That’s very much a compliment.
The Bank Job
*** 1/2
Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Daniel Mays, David Suchet
Directed by Roger Donaldson
Rated R