The Bank Job

I always enjoy a good movie where the bloke gets his rump kicked by a bunch of wankers. If this sounds like your kind of movie, then you'll love The Bank Job.

This movie is based on true events that occurred in London during 1971 that are commonly called the Baker Street Robbery. In this event, robbers tunnelled from a store front, under a Chicken Fast restaurant, and then under the vault of a bank on the corner. There they pilfered the boxes of all of the contents, including some scandalous photos.

Some of the photos obtained were purportedly of Princess Margaret getting naked and romping the room with some Jamaican drug trafficker. The problem is that while the bank robbery is going down, a ham-radio operator hears what is going on and reports it to the bobbies. Unfortunately, he has no idea where it's coming from, so the authorities have to go to every bank in the area and check them out.

What was interesting was in the credits, they gave an update as to what really happened. Of the x hundreds of boxes that were robbed, the majority of the owners refused to file a police report and identify the missing contents. I would suspect that it contained lots of blackmail material that no one wanted identified.

Subplots in the movie are the romance between 2 of the robbers (yes, one is a woman), the relationship between said woman and a member of M5 or M6 or whatever, the mafia guy and his relationship to Terry (Jason Stratham), the Mafia's tie to the Jamaican, the mafias tie to the Royal Family, etc, etc, etc...

As you can probably expect, there will some shootings, some torture, some arrests, and some people running from the law with hopes of living a new life under a new identity - because they can't arrest everyone or shoot everyone, well they did in Reservoir Dogs, but that's a different movie.

The movie also stars Saffron Burrows as (Martine Love, oh how fitting), Daniel Mays as Dave (pronounced Dive), and a smattering of some other British actors that I've never heard of, but do a good job.

Overall, I would say that this is one of the top 5 movies that I've seen this year. I must admit that the first 30 minutes seemed a little slow, but the rest of the movie grasped my attention and I could not look away. The Bank Job Rated R for violence - lots of it, nudity, violence, British cursing, occasionally incoherent British conversation, and, of course, more violence and language. The movie is 110 minutes long.

I give this movie 4 stars and recommend that you put this in your Netflix queue if you haven't already.