Bank Job

The Bank Job is based on a true story the way a person is based on a zygote. Long ago, there was an event in London where a group did rob a bank and used walkie-talkies to communicate with the lookout while tunneling into a bank vault and raiding the safe deposit boxes. A local ham radio operator picked up the transmissions and tipped off the cops, who didn't get to the bank until it was too late. For mysterious reasons, the government put a gag order on the crime and everyone can only speculate on why. The true job was huge, about four million pounds (equal to about twenty gazillion dollars) worth of jewels, cash and other shit was taken.

The Bank Job starts with that kernel of truth and then layers on the same old cheapass, heist cliches until what was a true story is just another glossy, superficial thriller. The thriller part is all right, even if the bank robbery isn't anything original. All the horseshit the movie builds up, though, as motive and character development stinks like the two dead goldfish in my freezer. Moviemakers are too insecure to let go of their old tropes, and I can't let go of Barney and Dragon.

Jason Stratham plays a shady used car dealer who we're introduced to while his shop is rolling back the odometer of a car. And we're supposed to like him. He is a small-time crook who works with a big-dicked porn star. Trying to make us like him, the movie says he's a good family man who dances with his young daughter and loves his wife. One day an ex-girlfriend (Saffron Burrows) asks him to jump a league out of petty crime and rob a bank vault. She doesn't tell him why, which is that she is being blackmailed by M5, the British equivalent of the CIA, to retrieve some incriminating photos from the vault in order to have a drug possession charge cleared. MI5 needs someone completely unconnected to them to do the dirty work.

On the way to the heist, the local porn king (David Suchet) gets involved. He is based on Paul Raymond, the real English porn king, who died recently and left me wondering if my collection of his old 8mm films of nurses sucking the dicks of unconscious patients is now collectible. Should I stop watching them before I brittle and break them in my projector? That would seriously put a dent in my Wednesday nights.

Also involved are local corrupt cops, a few low-level royals, the folks from MI5 and a Malcolm X-like black man who owns the incriminating photos and uses them as a bargaining chip to avoid prosecution for his own crimes. I don't have 8mm films of any of them, so I have no special affection.

Once the crime takes place, The Bank Job is efficient and effective. They rent a shop two doors down from the bank, tunnel under until they hit a 400-year-old crypt that leads them right under the bank vault. They hammer up into it and rob it over a weekend. A lookout sits on a roof across the street and walkie talkies the scene outside the bank to them. There are the usual movie false alarms and internal bickering. But the crew gets the loot and disappears. That's when the cops, the porn king, the MI5 and the Malcolm X wannabe figure it out and come after them. It all goes to hell faster than the Harelip will on judgment day.

The movie's biggest failures is its slavish adherence to the standard movie idea of good and bad. The thieves in this movie are, well, thieves. One cheats car buyers. One appears in porn. But the movie wants so badly for us to like and root for them that it overplays their "goodness". Director Roger Donaldson can't just let them be clever robbers and assume that'll hold our interest. And while nobody else in the movie appears to be any less morally challenged, they are portrayed as bad guys. I guess the movie world thinks that characters are like family: we'll be protective and support them, no matter how big of assholes they are, so long as we've known them from the beginning. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this is when the movie tries to justify the crime by suggesting much of what was in the safe deposit boxes was ill-gotten to begin with. That's just bullshit morality. It's okay to do it to steal from someone who steals is conditional nonsense and shows a spineless jerk who is just looking for reasons to do wrong.

The ending of The Bank Job smells like my wife's purse a day after a trip to the Country Buffet. I mean, once the gravy, chicken and jello she stuffed in there for later snacking--and then forgot about--starts to rot. Three members of the gang get killed, and one innocent M5 member does as well. Yet the survivors celebrate by cruising in in the Caribbean. Just fucking once, can't people feel shitty that their actions have killed other people? Is it that easy to forget the loss of life? Or is money that fucking important?

The Bank Job is half good and half bad, sort of like Oreo cookies. I wish those things were made completely from the sugared lard part, even if the brown cookies are the healthy bits. Heist: good; character development; boring. Don't expect the "based on a true story" shit to mean much more than the kernel for some screenwriter who needed an idea to wrap his generic shit around. Hell, sounds like one of those vegetarian wraps.Three Fingers.