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'The Bank Job'

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BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

March 7, 2008

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. But there's much else about "The Bank Job" that keeps you so preoccupied and wound up that the minutes fly by.

Director Roger Donaldson has shown in "Thirteen Days" (2000) and "No Way Out" (1987) an admirable facility for moving people around the knottier corridors of power through edge-of-the-seat plots. "The Bank Job," written by veteran TV scribes Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, gives Donaldson a vinegary spin on his winning formula. It combines elements of the classic caper movie with sociopolitical intrigue so outrageous that it's plausible.

Statham is more brooding than glowering here as Terry Leather, a family man whose vocation is selling cars and whose avocation is larceny. Having not accumulated enough swag to pay off nasty loan sharks, Terry is all ears when a childhood friend-turned-supermodel named Martine Love (Saffron Burrows) convinces him to help organize a break into an underground vault of safety-deposit boxes beneath a Lloyd's Bank building on Baker Street.

What Martine isn't telling her old pal is that she's being forced to orchestrate this heist by her married lover, a suave British intelligence agent (Richard Lintern), who in turn is being ordered by his superiors to retrieve compromising photos of a royal family member from the vault by using the caper as cover. (Just for fun, here are a couple hints as to the randy royal's identity: 1) It's a she and 2) Keep in mind that this is all taking place in 1971.

Which, by the by, is the year when a Lloyd's Bank really was robbed of millions. But because the British government still conceals the specific details for "national security" reasons, everything else in "The Bank Job" is purely speculative. This includes the role of Michael X (played by Peter De Jersey), a real-life street thug and black power demagogue who (it says here) used the aforementioned photos to avoid criminal prosecution.

To goose the stakes even higher, the robbers' booty from the boxes includes other photos taken of upper-crust Britons, including some of the MI-5 bosses, getting their jollies at an S&M club. Oh, and a ledger kept by porn king Lew Vogel (David Suchet) of payoffs to crooked police. Dear, dear! No wonder Terry and his fellow amateur crooks aren't exactly celebrating their success - and, given the nastiness of those aggrieved, there's not much to celebrate.

"The Bank Job" is fun to watch while both the heist and its often bloody consequences unravel in front of you. There's not a whole lot to savor beyond its dishy disclosures and nasty edges. But Statham raises his game in leading this motley, appealing cast, whose characters are lowlife and low-rent enough to validate even the wildest of the movie's conjectures.

THE BANK JOB (R). In 1971, a London bank was robbed of millions, but the British government still keeps the specifics hush-hush. This cheeky, crisply paced movie speculates that a welter of extortion, political corruption and hanky-panky reaching as high as the royal family was behind the cover-up. Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows co-star as the robbery's ringleaders. 1:50 (sexual content, nudity, vulgarities and violence). At area theaters.