The Bank Job

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

Watching The Bank Job, you buy the heist, and you also buy the entertaining layer cake of British society -- the black radicals, smut lords, and MI5 agents who treat cops like janitors, all fighting for their piece of the action.

The Bank Job gets it right. That is to say, it gets right the twists, the humor, the tension, the sexiness and, yes, the violence of a really fun, taut British thriller.

With a documentary style that cleanly charts the various players, their motives and the complications, Bank Job resurrects a golden era. “Job” well done!

For a movie that carries warnings about nudity, violence and language, The Bank Job is an oddly innocent crime story.

Admittedly, The Bank Job does have a bank job in it, but that only scratches the larcenous surface of a greater and more wickedly thrilling whole.

The Bank Job is a solidly built and entertaining Brit B-movie about a heist that goes wrong. And right. It's an elaborate caper, with odd but oddly believable crooks, compelling villains and loads of swell British slang.

It's a special pleasure to see Jason Statham using his tongue and wits to get out of trouble, not his feet and fists.

The Bank Job doesn't fuss around, though its plotting gets pretty thick at times, and the audience must do a little extra-credit work in sorting out who's out-maneuvering whom.

The Bank Job is not, as it may appear, a sequel to The Italian Job, but as a tightly wound heist movie in the same vein, it’s worth its weight in loot.

It's a confident British crime thriller that casts Jason Statham in a leading role, but doesn't let him hit anybody for more than 50 minutes.

Jason Statham, possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era, stars in a complicated and clever imagining of what might have happened in the mysterious 1971 London bank heist.

The film written by Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais (The Commitments, Across the Universe) feels both absolutely of the 1970s and absolutely fresh.

The fast-paced story keeps you guessing about the fate of the bandits, the loot, the secrets real and imagined, and the scalawags.

Based loosely on a true story from 1970s London, the film weaves together a pack of intriguing characters and an exhilarating tale to measure up with some more-recent triumphs of this genre.

It's kind of cool to see a contemporary thriller in which motivation is handled with a sharp eye and ear for ambiguity. Which is not to say that the requisite satisfying thrills aren't delivered -- they are, with commendable style.

Director Roger Donaldson keeps the suspense crackling. By the end, you'll want to know more about a heist that literally did shake the empire.

The movie plunges into this rank, choppy water and churns through it with a busily whirring story line and clear sense of purpose. The ride becomes its own satisfying reward, complete with the bumps and lurches along the way.

Lurking behind a criminally bad title is a surprisingly tight, clever, twisty heist tale, loosely based on real events and crisply directed by Australian-born, New Zealand-based filmmaker Roger Donaldson.

Imagine a blend of Snatch, Ocean's 11 and The Italian Job. Then juxtapose the staples of the caper genre with real events involving national security and high-level corruption, and the result is The Bank Job.

The Bank Job is nothing more than an efficient time-killer with the added bonus of being based on a real misadventure. But, unlike its benighted cast of characters, it gets the job done without a hitch.

It's not just a job, it's an adventure. At least that's what a good heist movie ought to be. And The Bank Job overcomes its generic title to prove exactly that.

The heist picture, which has such built-in appeal to our larcenous side, is a breezy genre which can get by on its hardware, a few quirky characters and a plot twist or two.

Roger Donaldson is a smart director who seems to thrive on this scuffed-up script. He juggles a complicated story with oodles of peripheral characters without dropping a subplot.

In a marketplace that tends toward cranked-up action thrills, it's just nice to watch a level-headed crime movie aimed at actual grown-ups.

A serviceable B-grade British heist movie, The Bank Job is no worse than its generic title. And no better.

It's a routine treatment of a heist too outrageous to be believed, even if it is based on a true story.

Regardless of his limited acting range and penchant for choosing the goofiest projects available, Jason Statham is pretty awesome, and The Bank Job marks his finest work in years

Sequences that should be unbearably tense -- the initial tunneling, a false-alarm discovery scare, a gruesome torture scene -- simply happen.

This may be just another bank job, like many you've seen before, but here's the payoff: it's a heist that actually looks real for once.

The Bank Job would probably go down a little easier if there weren't so much potential for seizing on a ripe cultural moment. Some stories are too good for mediocrity.

Blends together the daring of the bank-heist genre with the looming dread of the political-paranoia genre and, in the process, creates its own particular world: Call it the “Pandora’s box” genre.

Based on a true story of a 1971 British bank heist, the film is an innocuous, occasionally suspenseful, fast-paced thriller that whizzes by before it has a chance to wear out its welcomess.

Unfortunately for fans of either cranked-up action flicks or brainy thrillers, The Bank Job is just as generic as its name.

The movie doesn't hang together as a thriller, and the characters don't hang together as interesting people.

If the makers of The Bank Job had put as much effort into developing the characters and trying to generate some suspense as they did into exploring the story's sleazier aspects, they really might have had something.

Given that it's the dead zone for quality pictures, there are worse ways to kill two hours at the cinema this weekend. But you could still get more excitement out of working a shift on the concession stand.

The Bank Job ends with about 15 intriguing minutes, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt could pull a job ten times more exciting than this while drinking a martini and posing for People magazine.

The real question about The Bank Job, a by-the-numbers heist movie set in 1970s London, isn't ''Is it any good?'' but rather ''Why bother?''

Isn't the point of a heist picture that there's somebody, either a jauntily plucky bunch of robbers or one honest cop, worth rooting for? No such luck with this downbeat and sluggish thriller.

Director Roger Donaldson commendably avoids the violence-soaked artiness of Guy Ritchie's crime yarns, but fails to find a strong arc of action through the cluttered, sometimes confusing story.

In addition to vampire movies and psychological thrillers, let's add British crime films to the pile of genres in dire need of a temporary moratorium

There's no sense of urgency or real danger, the editing is lackluster and, despite a dynamic action star's presence, there's surprisingly little fighting.