The Bank Job

Viewer Rating:HSP has rated The Bank Job rating: 4 Star

In the early part of this movie you could not be blamed for thinking you were watching Eastenders. We start off in a garage with Terry Leather (Jason Statham) not looking too unlike Phil Mitchell & later meeting ex-Eastender Dan (Craig Fairbass) who seems to be getting very typecast as a "heavy" these days. Although this is a lot more entertaining than that awful soap. This is loosely based on an actual bank robbery that occured in the early 1970's in central London. Terry owns the garage selling second hand cars but owes money everywhere. He meets up with an old flame Martine Love (Saffron Burrows) who has a proposition for him to make some real money. She claims to know a guy who installs alarms & informs her he will be working on a bank for a week, so over a certain weekend there will be no alarm working in the vault. Terry eventually agrees after discussing it with some of his partners in crime, even though they are only petty crooks this is a chance of the big time. What they don't realise is they are being set up by the police to do this. A major drug importer who faces serious charges and a lengthy sentence is blackmailing a member of the Royal Family as he has pictures of her in a very uncomprimising position. The police know he keeps all his valuables in a safety deposit box & assume the pictures will also be there. So they hatch a plan to get some petty crooks to rob the vault & use Martine as their inside person to get the pictures back as she also faces a sentence in jail for importing drugs. The story moves along pretty quickly & not before long they have their team & hatch their plan. They rent a shop two doors down from the bank & decide to tunnel into it. The movie has some comic moments too to make us laugh. There is some nudity & violence included also, what London gangland movie doesn't have that. One thing I couldn't understand was the fact they were worried about leaving their equipment in the vault when finished the robbery in case it incriminated them... yet not one of them was wearing gloves!!! A lot more happens after the robbery as in fact they stirred up one huge hornet's nest among other gangsters & blackmailers as a lot more was in those boxes than they bargained for. It's hard to believe this actually happened but it did. I really enjoyed this movie... not for acting skills or anything like that, but it just has something to keep you interested till the end & that will do for me.

Review published on the 10 April 2008 21:29