Film

The first Guy Ritchie knockoff to claim fidelity to a true story, The Bank Job diagrams what happens when a routine coke bust forces Martine (Burrows) to cut a deal: In exchange for having the charges dropped, she’ll initiate a secret government scheme to rob a bank vault that contains photos of Princess Margaret in flagrante delicto acquired by the leader of London’s Black Power movement (De Jersey). Unbeknownst to the government suits, another safe-deposit box holds pictures of high-ranking officials and their dominatrix friends, as well as an incriminating ledger that the porn king of Soho (Suchet) will use extreme measures to retrieve. Lug Terry (Statham) approaches this obvious frame-up the way any petty-criminal mechanic would: Told the bank’s alarms will be off, he and his team attempt to reach the vault by tunneling through a crypt that runs under the Chicken Inn next door.

To call The Bank Job incoherent is like calling the sky blue; there’s a kind of sordid delirium to its plot, to the point where—for lack of involvement—you feel your brain slosh this way and that every time Donaldson tilts his camera. As the strands intertwine, the movie becomes something close to amusing, particularly during a train-station rendezvous that involves four separate bribes and exchanges. With someone other than Statham in the lead, The Bank Job might have been breezily absurd. It needs some personality to go with its pileup.