|
|
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Movie Review: The Bank Job
Bank Job’s script inspired by history
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
|
PLAY OFFICIAL TRAILER
out of 4 stars.
The Bank Job’s heist is staged by a gang of minor-league crooks led by Terry Leather. Jason Statham (The Transporter, Crank), in the best role and film of his career, is Terry, a used-car dealer and family man who owes money to a vengeful, never-revealed character. Statham’s no-frills performance focuses tightly on the heist at hand.
After the willowy Martine Love tells Terry that a London bank is temporarily ripe for the taking, the financially stressed Terry quickly agrees to do the job.
Saffron Burrows plays Martine, an elegant femme fatale with troubles of her own. Busted for drugs following a trip to Morocco, she is cooperating with a shadowy government agency — MI5 or MI6 or something like that — in a plot to take down Michael X, a vicious gangster and pimp who masquerades as the darling of London’s fashionably leftwing set. The very James Bond-like Richard Lintern co-stars as Martine’s suave government contact.
As simple as the actual robbery is, the plot elements swirling around it get complicated. Thanks to their skullduggery, the secretive lads at MI5 or MI6 open a Pandora’s box of troubles for Brits in high places as well as Soho porn lord Lew Vogel.
David Suchet, known in the United States for his television portrayal of Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, plays the slick old Vogel with quiet, chilling menace. Another apt performance in The Bank Job’s unusually well-cast ensemble comes from Peter de Jersey as the Trinidadian-born mobster Michael X, a real-life figure. The many supporting characters, fictional though they are, are likewise genuine.
Directed by veteran filmmaker Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) and written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Across The Universe), The Bank Job’s refreshing realism includes the consequences of messing with very bad people, consequences that Hollywood films typically gloss over. And the film moves solidly through its paces, no storyline leaps, gaps or puzzling ending. All of which makes The Bank Job an unusually satisfying movie-going experience.
ADVERTISEMENTS
