The Bank Job -- Movie Review

Man, that's a boring title. Know why it's so boring? It's boring because I liked The Bank Job. This annoys me because, had I not liked it, the title of this review would have been, "The Blow Job." That would have been cool and almost certainly would have gone viral and shot me to the heights of internet superstardom. Instead, I ended up liking and now have to end my master plan to write a series of bad reviews using the word, "Blow," like I did last week with the review I called Semi-Blow. Next week, I could have written something called, "Horton Blows a Who," but now the momentum has been lost. Oh well, on to the movie.

The Bank Job is a very entertaining movie that opens by saying it was based on true events. Here's a helpful tip that will carry you far through life: when a movie says it was "based on true events" 9 times out of 10 you will see a work whose fiction is so pure that you'd have to cut it with baking powder or else people would overdose while watching it. Harry Potter or Nightmare On Elm Street are probably closer to true events than something that claims to be a true story. The Bank Job manages to do a pretty good job, though, of mixing in some indisputably true events with stuff that they claim they got from a secret source.

The story centers around an actual robbery of a Lloyds Bank in 1971 London where the thieves tunneled in from a nearby building and managed to get into the vault containing safety deposit boxes and they managed to steal amounts speculated between 300,000 and 4,000,000 pounds (many of the box owners declined to say what was in them). The movie claims that the robbery was committed by some small time crooks headed by a guy named Terry Leather (played very well by Jason Statham) who were unwittingly put up to it by MI5, which is, for you Americans who don't have BBC America and know jack about foreigners, Britain's very secretive intelligence agency. You would think that, in the 1970s, MI5 would be really busy tracking down IRA members but, if this movie is to be believed, MI5 actually spent most of its time covering up sex scandals that involve highly placed members of the government. Supposedly, the Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, managed to get some very naughty pictures taken of herself which then fell into the hands of a radical black activist who called himself Michael X. Michael X was a real guy who, again according to this movie, managed to stay out of jail despite committing various crimes. He supposedly did this by threatening to publish the pictures of the Princess if he was ever convicted of a crime, pictures he kept in his safety deposit box in Lloyds.

MI5 decides to entrust their entire operation to a woman named Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), a woman who got caught smuggling drugs into the UK and makes a deal to put plan and execute the bank robbery. Again, they thought it was a good idea to hire a FAILED CRIMINAL to conduct their extremely important and sensitive illegal operation and were shocked when things started going wrong. And oh, do they ever go wrong. The movie takes place in 3 parts. Part 1 is where high ranking member of the British government has sex with whatever they can get a hold of. Part 2 consists of the bank robbery itself. Part 3 is the series of missteps where everyone from the robbers, low level mobsters, corrupt cops, Members of Parliament, the Queen's in-laws and men who are ironically described as British Intelligence manage to take a fairly straightforward and successful crime and manage to turn it into a complicated mess that threatens lives and has the potential to drag the entire government into serious scandal, or, rather, more of a scandal that it is normally dragged into.

I really liked The Bank Job. It has good performances, jokes in the right places, interesting characters and unbelievable plot twists that I didn't question until after the movie was over. And that, anyway, is a true story.