THE BANK JOB
June 20th 2008 01:41
Since his incendiary debut with 1977’s Sleeping Dogs (at the time, the first film to be made in New Zealand for 15 years) Australian filmmaker Roger Donaldson has helmed the gamut of genre filmmaking: studio thrillers (No Way Out, The Recruit), schlocky science fiction (Species), studio ‘event’ pictures (Dante’s Peak) and also the odd period epic (The Bounty). Since his last effort, the low budget passion piece The Worlds Fastest Indian, Donaldson seems to have felt the need to bank a few quid as a gun-for-hire directing the fact based crime caper, The Bank Job.
It’s 1971 and professional criminal Terry Leather (Jason Statham) is enlisted by old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows) to rob a London bank of its safety deposit boxes. What Terry and his crew don’t know is that one of the boxes contains highly sensitive photographs of a British royal family member in flagrante delicto. Pulling the bank job is only half the battle as Terry and his crew find themselves being blackmailed for a share of the haul by east end hard man Lew Vogel (Poirot’s David Suchet) as well as being muscled by shadowy MI5 agents hell bent on getting their hands on the sensitive photos.
Statham, who performance-wise is normally a gravelly-voiced one trick pony, is used well here although he’s not exactly stretching himself, Suchet all but devours the scenery in a role that amounts to a Don Sexy Beast Logan-alike but regardless the film works as a ‘does-what-it-says-on-the-tin’ crime caper. Still it never really rises above its deeply conventional script, which, given that the story is based on fact, is barely serviceable.
JARROD WALKER
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