Category: Reviews

“The Bank Job” is a 2008 British heist film that allegedly reveals the true circumstances behind an actual British bank robbery that happened in 1971 in London.  Whether it is mostly accurate about MI5’s involvement in the motive for the robbery is up for speculation.

It stars Jason Statham as Terry Leather the ringleader of the heist and he is likely to be the only actor whom an American viewer is at all likely to recognize.  Although I read somewhere that Mick Jagger had a tiny uncredited part.  But I never saw him on screen.

The plot has MI5 trying to figure out how to steal naked photos of royal family member Princess Margaret from the bank safety deposit box of a black nationalist revolutionary named Michael X who is using them as leverage to keep the British government from arresting and prosecuting him on various illegal activities.

The spies arrest a girl named Martine Love on drug charges and get her to agree to persuade her friend Terry Leather to use his contacts to rob the safe deposit boxes while the alarm system is conveniently down for repairs.  Terry agrees to run the job because his auto sales business is failing miserably and because the set-up seems simple and fool-proof.  He gathers his crew which include friends with various skills (most notably a fellow adept at using a “thermal lance” to cut through reinforced concrete.  The plan is to rent a store forty feet from the bank and over the weekend tunnel under the vault and cut their way through the floor.

But in many respects, the amateurish skills of the team cause the robbery to go off track.  A ham radio operator overhears their lookout man on the roof talking to the team on a walkie-talkie about the robbery in very explicit terms and he calls the police in.  A search across London is initiated to find which bank is being robbed and the gang has to bail before they can finish emptying all the boxes.  And worse, underworld figures who also used the safety deposit boxes to store records that can incriminate them, their powerful clients and crooked cops, begin the task of tracking down the robbers.  And they succeed.  One of the robbers is caught, tortured, forced to turn in his partners and then murdered.  Three others are found and two murdered.  One is held to blackmail Terry into handing over the records.

But when Terry finds out about the photos of Princess Margaret, he comes up with a plan to exchange the photos for immunity and new identities to allow them to escape the police and the underworld killers and keep the heist money.  Royal family member Lord Mountbatten acts as the intermediary between Terry and MI5 and trades the photos for the immunity.  And using the records that the underworld figures want back, Terry is able to use the police to rescue his associate and arrest the men who are hunting his crew.

Okay, so we really don’t know how much of all this is true.  But the important question is whether it makes a good movie.  I’ll say yes.  Jason Statham is a reliably entertaining actor and he provides the likeable character needed to give the audience someone to root for.  He’s got the working class persona with the wife and kids at home providing the pathos that the other characters don’t possess and he does get to beat up some bad guys which is his forte.  Regardless of whether the story is completely accurate the movie is entertaining and if you like heist movies I think you’ll enjoy it.