The latest from action maestro David Leitch isn’t exactly revolutionary, as in France, buy it is of the moment.
How to Rob a Bank
Director: David Leitch • Writer: Mark Bianculli
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Rhenzy Feliz, Anna Sawai, John C Reilly
USA • 2hrs 2mins
Opens Hong Kong November 12 • IIB
Grade: B
If The Big Short and Hell or High Water had a baby, it might look something like David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank, and a more suspicious person would wonder if its release got held up (this was supposed to be out in September) so as to drop after the mid-term elections in the US. It’s an Amazon picture, and the former bookseller’s head honcho has made no secret of being happy to suck on Washington’s teat. And taint. I mean, it didn’t make a difference because the Blue Wave (can we call that a proper noun?) swept over the country anyway, thanks to many of the same grievances held by the characters in writer Mark Bianculli’s agitating heist flick. It’s not a very subtle film, but it’s very populist, and it’s just one CEO street shooting shy of being a docudrama.
An angry, grieving young couple, Ryan (the now unemployed Superman actor Nicholas Hoult, rocking the blond), and his girlfriend Emi (Shogun’s Anna Sawai) head up a bank robbery crew that’s not only made a Robin Hood-type name for itself by knocking over insured banks and abjectly not buying expensive shit for themselves, but by documenting their antics in minute GoPro,heavily MTV-styled detail on a wildly popular YouTube channel. Helping them out are Afghanistan vet Vince (Pete Davidson), who has a wife (Tati Gabrielle) and toddler to worry about, and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz, HBO’s The Penguin), who’s fighting some kind of housing squeeze but is also a tech wizard. Every heist crew needs one now. Their blatant irreverence for law and order and borderline embrace of anarchy gets FBI robbery specialist Agent West (John C Reilly) to double down on finding them, which leads him to professor and convicted cybercriminal Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz). She invented an algorithm that could track anyone, anywhere, the ultimate surveillance tool, that got someone important doxxed and their house firebombed or something. She took the fall for it.
A people’s hero
No one has ever credited Leitch, the all around kick ass stunt guy, John Wick co-director and straight up director of Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train and the criminally underseen The Fall Guy with nuanced storytelling and great depth of character in between his admittedly stellar action set pieces, here augmented with a perpetually moving camera and TikTok/Reels-ready cuts. But there’s a first time for everything. Bianculli’s script has Hoult’s gang leader addressing his YouTube audience (and us) with a series of edutainment clips (recalling The Big Short). It makes the script a slightly anaemic take on the unholy alliance of business, government, the commodification of basic human dignity and how health care has been made a privilege of the wealthy. Ryan’s robbers call their channel Who’s Hungry? and encourage their legions to steal responsibly: shop at thrift stores, shop local, recycle. The action takes place in Pittsburgh, one of the US’s great union towns. And there’s no world right now where shitting on banks and corporations raking in record profits off its workers isn’t just enjoyable, it’s morally correct. So How to Rob a Bank is, if nothing, zeitgeisty in its condemnation of late-stage capitalism.
But while Leitch juices the visuals and Bianculli tries hard to agitate delicately, Bank hits its share of stumbling blocks. Ryan and Emi are sad – they’re a couple, so one guess as to why they’re sad – and do you think Vince has problems stemming form his time in the service, which he gets no help for? Is Vitality Trust CEO Walton (Christian Slater) somehow at the heart of these debacles? Granted the film often zigs in the spots you expect it to zag, but it drops threads that may have been heading somewhere interesting, and the special shout-out to the “good” cops who took the job to do good signals and unwillingness to truly rock the boat.
Which doesn’t make the film any less amusingly diverting – and a solid intro to any Fuck This Shit debate. At this point Hoult may be able to get away with reading a phone book, and for a change Davidson isn’t annoyingly smug. There are some real emotional beats in between heist tutorials. But Kravitz and Reilly turn out to be the stealth stars as an out of left field perfect buddy cop duo, even if Kravitz is doing the 2020s version of the archetypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl: The Micro-dosed Ultra-cool Tech Chica. Reagan is basically the character she played in Kimi. The super cool digital native that’s hyper-literate in all things coding and who subsists purely on junk food and weed. This is a new archetype that’s becoming a whole thing and I know I’ve seen her somewhere before. Give me a minute… Sawai is, of course, underused (someone had to be), but Slater is ironically charming playing the smarmy banker (everyone’s new favourite movie villain) he would have been cast to fuck with when he was young. Say… Hoult’s age.