Directors: David Leitch
Writer: Mark Bianculli
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Pete Davidson
Synopsis: A thrilling ghost story set in Dickens’ London, following one man’s supernatural journey to face his past, present and future as he fights for a second chance at redemption.
You have to scratch your head and laugh to yourself while watching the tediously pretentious and ridiculously sanctimonious film How to Rob a Bank. I mean, here’s a main cast of actors whose combined net worth, if you believe what you read on the internet, easily exceeds $50 million, preaching about how corporations chew up and spit out the little guy. You know, like we didn’t know that in the first place.
Meanwhile, they’re cashing their paychecks as we’re handing over our hard-earned money to watch a film that is, once again, pretentious and sanctimonious, preaching to a crowd that knows more than the filmmakers. How to Rob a Bank thinks it has its finger on the pulse of America, but its self-awareness consumes it so completely that it comes full circle and becomes oblivious to its core audience.
How? The irony is that the movie itself is being marketed to take our money by exploiting our outrage. How to Rob a Bank is the cinematic equivalent of, and I am borrowing from the point Aaron Sorkin wrote in The West Wing, from the old adage from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin about a politician who sees an angry mob running down the street and announces, “There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”
First and foremost, if you think I’m exaggerating, take this under advisement: the script from scribe Mark Bianculli (Cliffhanger) doesn’t even bother to explore the mechanics of robbing a bank, only the moral justification for doing so. That is a glaring oversight for a film that makes a bold claim that nine out of ten bank robberies go unsolved, or that the perpetrators are never caught or whatever statistic it’s trying to sell us.
For a movie with that title, director David Leitch (Bullet Train) is remarkably uninterested in the “how” and far more concerned with convincing us of the why. Anyone can make a movie about the outrage, so give us a good story from a fresh perspective. Instead, we get nothing but overdone style trying to set up unneeded humor, with manipulative subplots that hardly register, to cover up a contrived plot.
We can ignore the Catch Me If You Can setup, with John C. Reilly’s FBI agent plucking Zoë Kravitz’s Reagan Gardner from house arrest because she invented software to locate the unlocatable. Yet, her talent at headquarters consists of spotting seemingly unrelated objects in digital recordings and connecting the dots to find a group of punk rock anarchist bank robbers stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. So, you know, no software required.
On the flip side, in a storyline lifted from Heat, Nicholas Hoult’s Ryan, the group’s leader, and The Penguin’s Rhenzy Feliz, who plays Hugo, care more about social media uploads and flashy distractions than the planning and logic behind their robberies. The only storyline that makes us feel anything, especially given Congress’s shameful treatment of Veterans over the holiday, is Pete Davidson’s Vince, a former soldier whom the system has screwed.
Even this, though, feels manipulative, if not heartbreaking. Then, fine actors like Tati Gabrielle (The Last of Us) and Anna Sawai (Shōgun, F9: The Fast Saga) have little to do but wallow in their clichéd roles, which is nothing new. None of these characters are three-dimensional or fully formed. It’s just that the female characters seem to have no purpose other than looking concerned.
Then there’s the shameless setup for a sequel, which is hardly earned. The only thing How to Rob a Bank teaches its working-class audience is that the easiest way to rob someone blind is to sell them a ticket to a movie about sticking it to the rich.
You can watch How to Rob a Bank exclusively in theaters starting November 13th!
