The Bank Job

Why did a government coverup, a gag order, and a media blackout follow one of the biggest robberies in the history of the United Kingdom?

In heist thriller form, The Bank Job, based on that curious but true story, is here to explain why.

Jason Statham plays Terry, a used car dealer and sometimes small-time thief with a wife and two young daughters, who is deep in debt in 1971 to the kinds of gangsters who won’t extend the due date of his debt. They may also not extend the life of him — or several of his most cherished body parts.

So, when a model and ex named Martine (Saffron Burrows) comes into his shop to recruit him for a robbery of the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank in the affluent area of Marylebone in central London, he’s all ears.

The target is a roomful of safe deposit boxes containing jewelry and cash worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, much of it gained in such a way that the box owners could never come forward to report the items missing and claim losses if they were stolen.

What Terry doesn’t know, however, is that there are a few other unmentionables in those safe deposit boxes. Among them are scandalous photos, some of them involving members of the Royal Family, that have been kept secret for years. Some parties want said photos to disappear forever; others want to use them in a blackmail scheme. Which means that Terry just might be out of his depth.

Without knowing any of this, Terry rounds up a crew and they proceed to tunnel under the neighboring shop, which they’ve just purchased, with high-speed drills, and then up into the bank next door, with all its not-quite-so-safe deposit boxes. And they quickly find all that money and all those eyebrow-raising pictures.

Now, compared to some of the politicians, activists, government officials, and underworld operatives surreptitiously involved in the operation and waiting expectantly to see what incriminating evidence turns up in the boxes, the blue-collar crooks making these simple if unauthorized cash withdrawals seem like humanitarians.

Veteran director Roger Donaldson (Thirteen Days, No Way Out, Species, The Recruit) moves things along so many paths so quickly that you’re not always clear on exactly what’s going on. But the film never flags, and the director never lets the brisk pacing do much damage to essential comprehension.

The guess from here is that British audiences, more familiar with the actual story, will have an easier time following the complicated narrative and piecing it together. But you needn’t know anything about the facts in advance to find the tale intriguing.

When Donaldson switches the tone in the latter going, eventuating from an almost jaunty caper thriller into a violent gangster melodrama, the leap is a bit jarring. But it’s not terribly damaging — at least, not to us viewers: The captured robbers are another story.

The script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (who together wrote Across the Universe and Flushed Away) doesn’t do much with the story’s potential for absurdist humor and may not ultimately be all that rewarding. But it’s definitely diverting.

And you can measure your degree of fascination by just how much you want to read all the postscripts at film’s end detailing what happened to all the characters you just spent a couple hours with. You’ll notice that you’re reading them because you want to.

Jason Statham isn’t one to go outside his limited comfort zone — he remains much more comfortable in fight scenes than having to display any emotion beyond tough resoluteness — but he is generally convincing as the yarn’s protagonist.

So we’ll purloin 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for a fact-based British thriller about an unsolved crime that aims to explain why nobody involved ever came to trial.

The Bank Job does a nice job of liberating the contents of the safe deposit box that was this extravagant heist.

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