The Bank Job
This tense heist thriller is based on the true story of a London bank robbery in 1971. Four days after the robbery, the U.K. government issued a “D-notice” that requests the media to stop reporting on the story. The media complied, meaning that relatively little is known about the actual robbery. This gives the movie a fair amount of leeway while still maintaining a claim of veracity. Not that it really matters. The story as told in the movie, however much it might deviate from or adhere to the actual events, is gripping and taut. Jason Statham plays Terry, a car mechanic with a petty crime past who, with his mates, jumps at the chance to make one big score and get out of small-time crime and low-income labor. That chance is served up by Martine, played by Saffron Burrows. Martine is a model and one-time friend of Terry’s who gets busted for a drug offense. A government official tells her that if she can steal some compromising photos of a member of the royal family that is held in a safe deposit box at a London bank, she’ll be free and clear. The problem is that it must be done with no official government involvement, so the bank job must still be pulled off in spite of the best efforts of the bank and the police to prevent that sort of thing.
What no one bargained for is that lots of people have a tendency to put embarrassing and compromising material in their safe deposit boxes, and many of them can get extremely upset when that material goes missing. Pulling off the robbery is not the most challenging aspect of the operation. The movie is tense and suspenseful, and I have to confess that the link to a real bank robbery added to the intensity for me. Some aspects of the movie are certainly fiction, but the basic events and historical figures are real.