The Bank Job (2008)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

First of all, when a movie says that it is "based on a true story" that means absolutely nothing. So why do so many reviews put so much stock in that? I can't believe so many reviewers thought this was such a clever heist movie.I hope that no one involved in this project pulled a muscle in their brain coming up with the title "The Bank Job." Instead of a walkie-talkie they may as well have communicated with their lookout with bullhorns. Worst radio security ever.They have to take a nap in the middle of the job? In any event, there was no reason to bring this up in the film. And then they swill champagne a bit later?FYI: If you garrote someone there's no need to put a plastic bag over their head.

Roger Donaldson's sharp, suspenseful, and very human crime drama, based on, apparently, a true story of what some minor criminals find in the safety deposit boxes in a small bank, delivers what is critical for a heist movie to succeed:1. Everyone is a real, flesh and scars human 2. Violence is usually threatened and almost never graphic 3. Decency and degeneracy can walk hand in hand 4. If the good guys win, it's going to be at a terrible costI just saw another Donaldson picture a few months ago, The November Man. Remember how I appreciated the line delivered by Pierce Brosnan to his protégé, something like, "You can either be a human or a taker of human life; you can't be both." The November Man was a more standardized action flick, but the moral choice Brosnan's trainee has to make sends the quality of the movie up 1/2 dozen notches right away.In The Bank Job, Donaldson is able to convey the vulnerability felt by many of the primary and secondary characters. There's real fear on the faces of the guys at MI-5 (or is it MI-6; I never know). Jason Statham (who turns in a darn-good performance here) is torn between benefiting his family or destroying it. I don't know all the other actors, but everyone of them, as I said before, is so real, so smart, craven and foolish. The heart and soul of The Bank Job is in its ability to convince the audience that what they are seeing is plausible, maybe even real. When an up-and-coming spook spots a young woman he sent on an undercover mission in the Caribbean, covered in a shallow grave, he doesn't act tough. He forces back his emotions, and then orders the local authorities to burn the bad guy's house to the ground. If this guy can hang on to his career, he's going to be a holy terror in the British Intelligence community. Except for the usual problem of deciphering Statham's thickened and mumbling accent, and the less-than-a-clear-mix musical soundtrack for 1971, I found nothing to complain about here. If you find The Bank Job at your library, in a bin at Wal-Mart, or on Netflix, I would suggest you drop everything for the evening to watch a fine piece of restrained film-making. One of the message boarders commented that, if this had been made in the US, what made it so good would have died almost instantly. How true.

I have only seen one other Jason Statham movie and that was Lock Stock and two smoking Barrels. I do not remember him at all. I have always avoided his films because they look as thought they are stock(no pun intended) stupid action movies. However this was on TV so I recorded it to have a quick look. It has a great British cast of character actors and it is written by Clements and La Frenais which guarantees quality. Jason Statham is no Olivier but he carries his role well ably supported by reliable actors like Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Saffron Burrows, Peter Bowles and others. There is hardly any wasted screen time in this gripping thriller, said to be based on actual events - if that is so then it is amazing indeed. It starts quite slowly and one is tempted to bin it for the first 15 minutes but then the seemingly unconnected threads begin to knit together and you just have to watch it. I will take the opportunity to check out Stathams other movies if they are half as good as this. It is great when one is surprised by the unexpected when you watch a film.

No exaggeration. The box described the movie as based on a true story which took place in 1970's Britain about some small-time crooks who are lured into robbing a bank's safe deposit box, unaware that they are pawns in a government plot to remove sexually compromising photographs involving a member of the Royal Family. Intriguing premise, right?Okay, the film starts out showing brief nude scenes which we later learn are what had been in said photographs. Then we learn of the conspiracy plot, and how the small-time crooks are found and lured in without their knowledge. There is also an irrelevant subplot about a black man having sex with a white woman, evidently as some sort of 1970's political statement. But then comes a scene where the crooks go to a strip club, then a brothel, and we see lots and lots of bare breasts and buttocks and the crooks get bound in leather and chains for S&M.We turned it off at that point. We were expecting a story about crime and conspiracy, but the movie clearly entered gratuitous sexuality territory. It's one thing to be suggestive and another to be outright pornographic. If you want a bank heist movie, there are plenty of infinitely better choices, and if you want porn, well, there's no shortage of that on the Internet.