Movie Review: ‘The Bank Job’ (2008)

With all the high-tech crime capers and bank robbery movies that we’ve seen lately, it was utterly refreshing to see one set in the 1970s when all you had were walkie-talkies and jackhammers.

The Bank Job stars Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows, plus a very good supporting cast, in a film based on a true bank heist that took place in London in September of 1971.

The movie is great, but the story behind it is just as fascinating. In 1971, a huge amount of money was stolen from Lloyds in London’s Baker Street bank. The investigation was immediately hushed and all media was given a 30-year gag order on the entire affair.

There was a man named Robert Rowlands who overheard the thieves conversing on their walkie-talkies over his HAM radio and tried to get the police involved. The tapes of the thieves’ conversation was played on the airwaves for a day or two afterwards, but was quickly silenced like the rest of it.

Now that the gag order is gone, a few more details have leaked out, but still nothing public. Yet the writers of this film, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, apparently have a “deep throat” informant that gave them a lot of the material in the film.

That and the true radio conversation transcripts really gives this film an authentic feel to it.

The movie itself is just a great bank heist film. There are quite a few subplots and intersecting stories at the beginning, so you kind of need to pay attention to what is happening and who is doing what, but once you get into it, the story is quick and the heist itself nail-biting.

Which is pretty amazing considering you are going into it knowing that the guys pulled it off. But it’s not really just about the robbery itself, but also the aftermath and how they try to get away with it.

The basic plot of the movie and the reason for the heist is that the government wants to recover some scandalous photos of one of the royal family held by a drug dealing terrorist that they can’t touch because of them.

Of course…the photos are in a safe deposit box in the Baker Street bank that the authorities cannot get to legally.

So how do you do it? Get someone else to break into the bank for you.

And make sure they have no idea why they are doing it so that they have zero connection to you.

That’s how the job gets to Statham. An old friend (Burrows), or maybe more than a friend, approaches him with information on the Baker Street bank and how their basement alarms will be off for a week since they keep being set off by trains going by.

Thus an amateur group of thieves attempts a crime without having any idea that they’ve been set up.

Good acting throughout, The Bank Job is a great little caper with thrills and twists.

On a scale of 1-5 popcorns: