Reviews

The Bank Job

Faking it

By MARK BAZER | March 5, 2008

2.5 Stars

THE BANK JOB: If it’s not a great heist movie, it does a good job of pretending to be one.

The Bank Job either is a really good heist movie or does a good job of faking it. As opposed to, say, Ocean’s Eleven, there’s not much wit in the dialogue, the heist itself is a pretty uninteresting affair, and the movie leans heavily on “shit is going down” music even when not all that much is happening. But damn if director Roger Donaldson (Cocktail!) doesn’t do a bang-up job telling and tying together the based-in-fact story of a group of working-class blokes in early-1970s London who tried to rob a bank’s safe-deposit vault in the face of 1) corrupt cops; 2) MI5 agents; 3) a wanna-be black militant; 4) an aging pornographer; and 5) the requisite femme fatale. Jason Statham leads the band of childhood friends in the job, and he’s both smart enough to sense he’s being played by people far more powerful than he is and dumb enough not to walk away. Kind of like us moviegoers. 110 minutes | Boston Common + Fenway + Fresh Pond + Circle/Chestnut Hill + suburbs

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