The Bank Job (2008)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

"The Bank Job" involves the usual twists you find in a heist movie, but director Roger Donaldson ("The World's Fastest Indian", "The Bounty", "Smash Palace") and co-writers Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais infuse new life into the genre of grim caper film. It's a compelling, violent and at times super-charged narrative which is based on a long hushed-up true story.

It's set in London, 1971. A group of part-time working-stiff East End criminals, led by car garage owner Terry Leather (Jason Statham) are given the opportunity of their nefarious lifetimes when they get a crack at breaking into a West London bank. It comes on a tip courtesy of beautiful con artist Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), who is secretly cooperating with a former boyfriend who happens to be very high up in government circles. She seduces Terry--verbally and otherwise-- into pulling off the Baker Street bank heist in the hope she can go scot-free from an airport drug smuggling rap.

The goal is to steal a lot of loot out of posh people's safety deposit boxes by tunneling under the bank. (The sensors have been conveniently turned off.) It's the deal and the steal of a lifetime.
What this group of small-time crooks don't realize--right away--is that they are pawns in a scheme launched by one of the British spook services, MI-5. Seems there's a little matter of some compromising blackmail photos in the bank vault--snaps of Princess Margaret having a bit of a nude romp in the hay with a couple of her male "subjects". The black radical Michael X, who processes the pictures, is a thorn in the side to the Establishment, and he and his associates are committing major crimes with impunity as long he has the photos and negatives of the naked princess in his safety deposit box.

Hence the need for a team of under-informed outsiders, who will be so busy stealing the money and jewels and gold they won't notice Martine copping the blackmail pictures and delivering them to her ex-boyfriend in Whitehall.

When the gang also comes across some other revealing photos---of prominent MP's getting serviced in a bordello and a ledger containing records of police pay offs to a shady pimp, Terry and his group are in for a tough time trying to save their hides and extricate themselves from all the trouble they have wrought. The movie gains momentum as it goes along as the group gets the heat from three sides simultaneously--the corrupt coppers, the government big-shots and the vice-peddling criminals, all with a vested interest in keeping the lid sealed on their sordid and intertwined business and pleasure set-ups.

The nasty nightclub owner-pimp with a passel of gun-happy goons is played nicely by David Suchet, who some might remember from his work in the Inspector Hercule Poirot television series.