Title: THE BANK JOB

Director: Roger Donaldson

Starring: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Richard Lintern, Stephen Campbell, Daniel Mays, Peter Bowles, Keeley Hawes, David Suchet

Length: 111min





Let us summarize the movie – Awesome!

I loved it. Everything about the movie. The plot, the actors, the performances, the setup, the direction, screenplay…everything! It is a complete package involving murder, corruption and a sex scandal with links to the Royal Family - a story in which the thieves were the most innocent people involved!

The movie opens with a treat for the eyes, well two treats actually if you know what I mean *wink wink* (go sue me if you must!) which immediately would catch any bloke’s attention unless well ahem unless his pendulum swings the other way (yup go sue me again!). The plot gathers pace fairly quickly and things start getting into motion. It is not one of those movies where you have to wait a good length of time for things to start getting into motion and when they do the movie almost begins a roller coaster ride where you are desperately trying to hold onto the ride to stay in synch with what’s happening and simultaneously are trying to enjoy the height, the fall, the vista etc. etc.



Jason Stratham as Terry


The plot in a nutshell is this –there is a bad mafia guy (Peter De Jersey as Michael X) who has compromising pictures of a member of British Royal Family, apparently a princess (yeah yeah God save the queen!) that he uses to blackmail the law to have his way in the country. He does all kind of black activities and the law can not touch him because of those photographs. The MI5, MI6, and all other MI* families really want these photographs back so that they can bust this guy’s, ahem bottom. They know that this guy keeps these photographs in the safety deposit box of a bank but the problem is that they (or any other arm of the law) can neither simply ask the bank to handover the contents of the locker nor can they force their way into the bank.

Complicated eh? Thought so.

So what they do is this - they rope in a once famous model while she is coming back from a vacation from Morocco by busting her on a dug smuggling charge. This model (Saffron Burrows as Martina Love) then gets in touch with a “guy in desperate need of money” in London(our good guys of the movie) and feeds them a story about this bank and how for a brief period, the bank’s lockers would not have a safety alarm system and the millions of pounds of black money simply sitting in the vaults yelling to be rescued. These guys decide to break the bank vault to get whatever they can and they actually do that by digging an underground tunnel beneath the bank from a neighbouring shop!

Here’s when things get interesting.






Saffron Burrows as Martina Love


The leader of the pack (Jason Statham as Terry) had a fling in the past with Martina Love and was suspicious of her. While Martina tries to get the photographs out of the particular safety box from the bank he comes over to her for a chat and grabs the box and lo! It turns out that a Madame from a brothel used the same bank to store some of her stuff. This brothel is a real elite top of the line ones where most of the makers and breakers of British law, parliament and the likes meet to enjoy the sins of the flesh. This Madame of the brothel had setup a recording system with the help of Michael X where she captured the sins of flesh of these policy makers on various electronic and print media like snaps, video motions etc. and all of that now finds its way into the hands of Terry and Martina Love. And of course Terry is smart enough to realize that he and his crew was very conveniently set up to rob this bank to get to these photos. The big question that now faces him is “who set him up” and a even bigger one – “how does he now save his….. ahem you know the word here”

Bang!

What unfolds now is a complicated three party dealing between MI5 (or 6), these bank breaker guys and another gentleman (well hardly a gentleman but what the heck) who used the bank to store the records of payments he has made to various law officers in order to facilitate the running of his black businesses. He was also involved in some dealings with our original bad guy.

Verdict: The movie as I have mentioned already is fast paced and very well directed. I recommend this as a must watch!

Keep watching this space for my next review.