How To Rob A Bank sees director David Leitch smashing up cars, and quietly making a new Robin Hood film. Here’s our review. I can’t remember too many intricate plot points of 2010’s The Other Guys, the hit action comedy from writer/director Adam McKay, starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark. But I firmly remember this: ... How To Rob A Bank Review | When action cinema meets Ken Loach
How To Rob A Bank sees director David Leitch smashing up cars, and quietly making a new Robin Hood film. Here’s our review.
I can’t remember too many intricate plot points of 2010’s The Other Guys, the hit action comedy from writer/director Adam McKay, starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark. But I firmly remember this: it had an angle, and it was really pissed off. It found its reason for being, and even though I can’t confess to ever being blown away by it, I think about it a lot more than I was expecting to.
I suspect I’m going to be thinking about How To Rob A Bank as well. It’s a similarly cheesed off marriage of action comedy and punching up, crucially not forgetting that it needs to exist as a piece of entertainment in the first instance.
The setup presents a fairly straightforward-looking game of cops of robbers. On the robbers side there’s The Wolf – that’d be Nicholas Hoult, some eye make up, a new haircut, and a mask – a YouTube sensation whose numbers and popularity grow as the film progresses.
The Wolf heads up a gang of people who make a compelling case for bank robbery, employing lively social media posts to make their case. Against them there’s the predictably Luddite veteran cop, John C Reilly’s Agent West, who recruits in a young savvy under house arrest hacker, Zoe Kravitz’s Reagan, to try and track them down.
The methodology of the robbers is to document their work on social media. The methodology of the cops is for John C Reilly to look like a cross between former Everton midfielder/Sunderland manager Peter Reid and Jim Robinson from Neighbours, while trying to act as a moral barometer for the story.
Behind the camera, keeping this on metaphorical and actual track is David Leitch, who’s effectively made an action movie that’s having a Ken Loach drive-by. The genre was simpler in the 1990s: there were obvious goodies, obvious baddies, and the audience was given little doubt as to who to root for. How To Rob A Bank gleefully upends that, its lines starting to blur even before Christian Slater turns up in a role that may as well be called Bastard Bank Manager Played By A Famous Person.
The script, from Mark Bianculli, has been bouncing around Hollywood for a little while, and it’s not tricky to see why. On the on hand, it’s easy to see why people would want to make it. On the other, it’s not an easy collection of ingredients to wrestle.
Commendably, each character gets a reason for being, and we’re in little doubt why everyone on each side of the fence does what they do. It’s not always subtle about it, but also, the background work has been done. Furthermore, there’s an absolute steel backbone here, and it’s quite something to be watching an Amazon-backed movie talking to me about the rich taking everything and leaving little behind for the poor.
This is not a point delivered once either, and How To Rob A Bank is the angriest mainstream action film I’ve seen in some time.
Frustratingly though, it’s not the triumph I ended up willing to be. Lots goes right. Few can stage a car smash or a chase like David Leitch, and in an era of digital muzzle flares and quick edits hiding things actually going on, I’m left with little doubt at all that a huge team of people put a shift in here. I read through the end credits, in modern cinema usually awash with digital effects artists (with no slight to them at all.) Here, the balance was firmly towards physical production, and you can tell.
Yet as a piece of filmed entertainment, I found it a little way short of Leitch’s previous blockbuster, the hugely enjoyable and riotously funny The Fall Guy. I guess The Fall Guy was a little more concentrated, whereas How To Rob A Bank is juggling an action comedy, a social commentary, and a social media channel, all on the same screen.
Leitch does his damnedest to make it work, with Pete Davidson, John C Reilly and Zoe Kravitz in particular on strong form. He’s happy to throw in a guinea pig, a reptile wrangler headline on a scrolling news channel, an enormous lollipop, and a strong case for it being the best Robin Hood film of the year too.
But my suspicion is I’ve watched a lot more action comedies than the audience this is ultimately aimed at, and I’m a bit too familiar with the beats How To Rob A Bank is still reliably hitting under the surface. I like it, and I enjoyed it. Much like The Other Guys, I’m curious to know just what I think about it 15 years down the line.
And I’m glad it exists.
How To Rob A Bank is in UK cinemas from 13th November.
