The Bank Job: A Quick Review

The Bank Job is a fun little heist movie, one of those neat little movies with a bunch of semi-related plot lines that all intersect neatly thanks to the cunning and charm of our leading hero. Usually these kind of movies are "heist gone wrong" deals, but this is more "what goes wrong even if the heist goes right." The leads all do their parts well, and its easy to get swept up in the movie.

With a few minor exceptions...

Abrupt changes in tone can either work for or against a movie. Genre movies come with certain expectations, and a filmmaker can either push the envelope on those or stick to the playbook. You can go right or wrong in both cases. Here are some movies I can think of off the top of my head that had what I thought of as fairly disjarring tone shifts:

• From Dusk Til Dawn (road movie to vampire slasher movie)
• Mumford (Quirky romantic comedy with odd bits of dark drug addiction mixed in)
• Mulholland Drive (Top Notch David Lynch movie to Lesbian porn film)
• Million Dollar Baby (Triumph of Will movie to Assisted Suicide flick)
• Event Horizon (2001-ish Sci Fi movie to Laughable Gothic Slasher)

In The Bank Job, it was a standard heist movie that worked in fairly brutal bits of torture porn that just didn't fit the tone. For me, they took me out of the film. Like any edgy flick, they were trying to show just how tough and badass the bad guys are, but they could have accomplished the same end with less nastiness. I'm not by any means a squeamish guy. But if you've set a successful tone for the first hour of the film, stick with it.

Jason Statham and David Suchet were a joy to watch. Statham is on the short list of folks we'll see in about anything. (And incidentally is only 35... I would have pegged him older, but oddly he looked 35 when he did Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 10 years ago.) The Transporter films are wonderfully guilty pleasures, and his streak continues here. (Ok, streak doesn't really hold... I'm not seeing the horrible LOTR knock off In the Name of the King that he did. And Crank, wasn't nearly as fun as it should have been.) Suchet is one of those folks that impresses me in everything I see him in, but unfortunately keeps picking projects I have no real interest in. (My Poirot threshold has been surpassed.)

Anyway, this is worth a rent. It really made me want to go rewatch both Ronin and The Tailor of Panama, movies with a similar vibe. Maybe this weekend...

As a side note, one huge thrill for me was seeing the neighborhood. I lived in London for the Fall of 1997, and stayed about 200 yards from the bank in question here. Every week, I'd buy my copy of Time Out from the newsstand across the street. For bored people who like to look at maps, on this map the bank is roughly shown (it's actually at the corner of Marylebone Rd and Baker St) and I lived at 10 York Terrace East, just off to the west. Fun stuff. Triggered a bit of wanderlust to get back to the UK, but with the dollar where it is now, I couldn't afford the cab ride from the airport...

(On another side note, the blog's spacing function is really bothering me... I can't get the second half of this post double spaced for the life of me. Very annoying. >:(