A "review" of The Bank Job

Within five minutes of the start of this film, I was conflicted. I didn't know whether to call it the best film ever, or to call it the best thing ever. It helped that there were more nipples in this movie than Emmanuelle in Space and that I was curled up at the Redmond venue of The Big Picture with a huge bowl of popcorn and a tall blonde with good legs. She came by way of the Red Hook brewery up the street a ways and was the last pour from the tap before the keg was officially declared dead.

The Bank Job alleges that it is "based on a true story", which means that some hack did an afternoon of research, got a feel for one or two actual documented events, and then built a convoluted framework around those fragments of reality that involves a car chase, a kidnapping, and at least one bedroom scene. If you want to see something that's based on a true story, watch the news. The Bank Job doesn't try to take itself too seriously in this regard, as it evidenced by the fact that Turkish bones that chick from Boston Legal in a bank vault and nobody seems to mind too much.

Walking out of the film, I decided that I would pay to watch a movie where Jason Statham needs a bottle of White Out correction fluid, but he can't find any. Bonus points go to the producer who makes this happen if he can enlist Ellen Page to play the supporting role of the girl who works at Staples and gets handcuffed to him during the inevitable hostage sequence.

The plot of this new movie I want to see, White Out, is probably twice as complex as that of The Bank Job: Jason Statham robs a bank. That's it. Oh, sure, there's a reason he does it, and in true British crime noir fashion, there are six or seven different factions that are all competing for limited valuable resources. If you could follow Snatch, then The Bank Job is practically pablum. In a nutshell: She likes he, and he likes she, but he owes money, which she can provide if he robs a bank and lets her grab some incriminating photos that would embarrass the Royal Family if they ever got out. It's your standard crime movie. You can tick off the cliches that you'll find in any example: the long-lost love interest who comes back into town with a juicy idea for a heist, the collection of a rag-tag bunch of mutually-suspicious no-goodniks, the close call, the MacGuffin, the other MacGuffin, the hand-off in a crowded train station. It's all there.

I imagine that Hitchcock would have knocked this plot out of the ever-lovin' ballpark. (There are those who might say he already did.) It's a shame he's long gone, because even with the slick production of whoever the hell directed The Bank Job, it seemed so completely derivative of every other British crime noir movie I've ever seen that there wasn't a whole lot that was new in this one. I didn't regret watching this movie in the slightest. Jason Statham plus nipples. C'mon, it's not rocket science. My only real hesitation in watching it again is that there isn't a whole hell of a lot in this picture that I couldn't get from Snatch. Or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Or Layer Cake.