Filled With Political Blackmail, ‘The Bank Job’ Pays Dividends

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CHICAGO – Done properly, the classic heist or caper film is a welcomed genre of suspense-filled locations, stereotyped experts and the big cash payoff. Based in speculative part on the true story of a robbery in a vital London safety deposit vault, “The Bank Job” adds the spice of political intrigue as an underlying factor to the actual crime.

Jason Statham in “The Bank Job”. Photo credit: IMDb

Action movie star Jason Statham plays Terry: the leader of the wankerish gang of thieves who’s recruited because his former criminal colleague, Martine (Saffron Burrows), knows of an alarm shutdown in the vault and easy assess to it.

What Terry doesn’t know is that Martine is working for a shadowy operative named Richard (Tim Everett), who forces her into coordinating the bank job in exchange for the elimination of her felony drug charge.

Richard is the first level of a chain of command that reaches to the highest echelons of British government.

The reasons for this somewhat petty break-in become the fuel for both its success and failure while ultimately culminating at a much deeper and more paranoid intensity than the bank jobbers ever anticipated.

Saffron Burrows in “The Bank Job”. Photo credit: IMDb

The best part of all this activity was the setting: early 1970s London at the height of the political activist state.

Fringe characters who actually existed – including a radical named Michael X – interact and stoke the plot engine for both the bank robbers and the background government officials.

There is even a dinner scene with John Lennon and Yoko Ono – in their full peace activist mode of the era – breaking bread with the provocateurs.

With everything at stake and without the full knowledge of the consequences, the robbers display unusual heft in their characterizations while fulfilling all the conventional heist movie expertise.

“The Bank Job”. Photo credit: IMDb

Statham actually breaks out of his usual stoic action hero. This makes the caper more entertaining, suspenseful and slightly comical as some miscues emphasize the hapless nature of subcontracted thieves.

Because they become scapegoats for more powerful concerns, this allows Statham’s character to influentially take over the negotiations once the importance of the loot becomes clearer.

Power and money are major themes of the story, which highlights the arrogance associated with wealth and authority most prominently.

This cuts through both the vulnerabilities of base desires within human beings and how many resources are wasted simply to cover them up. The biggest robbery in that case is the very moral soul of civilized society. Even with punishment, some crimes can never be justified.

By PATRICK McDONALD Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com