Kathmandu:

Two singular facts about The Bank Job, which stars Jason Statham that would please movie goers is that without employing the hi jinks of contemporary cinematography which owes itself to MTV and commercials, director Roger Donaldson goes for slow and suspenseful without losing

anything when pitted against The Bourne series. The second fact is about royalty and how Britain in 1971 would have benefited by not having it.

Says critic Glenn Kenny, “This movie announces itself as both a period piece and a throwback with its opening frames: an unknown female in a ‘70s-cut bikini bottom cavorts in a blue pool as the innuendo-laden opening riff of T-Rex’s Get It On (Bang A Gong) inspires involuntary toe-tapping.

“Based on a true story, the movie’s titles have told us just seconds before, and if that’s in itself a fact — you never know, these days — then it’s one of the most god-damnedest true stories ever. From a bikini bottom in a pool we go to a cabana or something on a tropical island, and the bikini bottom’s having orgiastic sex with two locals whilst an unknown man snaps them in action. We then get a ‘1971 — One Year Later’ scene followed by a ‘3 Weeks Earlier’ scene, but worry not — soon The Bank Job, expertly directed by oft-ill-employed Roger Donaldson settles in to a linear, engaging, suspenseful groove.

One of the things that makes the picture work is its unusual setup. Those tropical-sex porno shots feature, as it happens, a member of Britain’s royal family, and the photographer, a murderous pimp who’s masking his sinister motives behind a pretense of black activism, has the snaps in a safe-deposit box in a relatively obscure London bank. Would-be drug-dealer Martine (Burrows), caught by the fuzz in customs, appeals for mercy to the MI6 agent she’s been sleeping with (Lintern); he proposes the titular bank job, and Martine recruits rough-hewn Terry (Statham), a would-be auto-shop entrepreneur with some gambling debts, to put together a crew and tunnel into the safe-deposit vault. Terry’s not let in on the real reason for the heist; all he and his crew need know is that there are riches in the other hundreds of boxes down there.

So here we’ve got intelligence agents watching criminals watched by street cops, eventually tracked by ham radio operators and hassled by building residents disturbed by the noise of the jackhammer tunneling under the vault… in other words, the usual number of nail-biting components of a heist thriller cubed. The suspense aspect works like mad, but what’s also noteworthy is the character component.”

Concludes Nicholas White, “Shiny and neatly wrapped, The Bank Job is like a present you missed the first time around. Based on the 1971 Lloyds Bank ‘Walky-Talky Robbery’ in the UK, the film incorporates most of the crime’s actual colourful mortals: a porn star, a local druggie, and a British equivalent of Malcolm X, Jason Statham’s Terry Leather is the movie’s only fictionalised amalgam. Fixing cars as a low-rent bad guy, Terry is propositioned by old friend Martine (Saffron Burrows) — an incandescent, low-lidded local gadfly — to rob a local bank’s safety deposit boxes, and split the proceeds. The extra actors start piling up, to mildly confusing effect. Two teams of British spies

chase down Terry and Martine, as does a separate band of merry crime-makers.

The Bank Job is also a condemnation of behind-the-scenes government collusion with giants in the criminal underground, a commentary on how the UK system works, and how absurd it is when something goes awry. The movie’s real-life tie-in gives it extra credibility points.”