Even if the name Jason Statham doesn't ring a bell, his face is probably familiar. For the past decade, the gruff, handsome Brit with the East London accent and hair-trigger temper has been slowly building a career based on tough-guy B movies with names like “Snatch,” “The Transporter,” and “Crank.”
Some of them are better than others, but all of them are better than they probably ought to be thanks to Statham's brand of macho charisma. His newly-released heist flick “The Bank Job” is the best of the bunch to date.
Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly reviews "The Bank Job."
Set in London in 1970, “The Bank Job” is very loosely based on a true story that, had it been fully aired at the time, would have been a royal scandal and a half. The film opens in the Caribbean where a member of the British royal family is captured on film frolicking in extremely tawdry situation. The photos, which are then hidden in a safety deposit box at a London bank, are enough to give the government serious concern. So much so that they coordinate a conspiracy to hire a bunch of two-bit grifters and thugs to rob the bank and the snaps residing in the bank's vaults and hand them over to MI6.
The thing is, Statham's band of robbers know nothing about the scheme. They're just patsies lured by the prospect of a big score and the double-dealing femme fatale who hires them (Saffron Burrows). As far as the intricacies of movie heists go, “The Bank Job” doesn't break any new ground. It's not a Byzantine Rube Goldberg toy like “The Italian Job,” another film that featured Statham by the way. But what makes it better than you'd expect is Statham's doomed good guy at the heart of it. From the opening minutes you know he's going to wind up as the fall guy. The only one who doesn't seem to know this is Statham. And it takes a pretty decent actor to pull that off.
Now for a look at what else is new on DVD: in “21,” Kevin Spacey leads a group of nerds on a quest to scam Las Vegas; in “Last Winter,” a horror movie gets set in the Arctic; and in “Round Midnight,” jazz great Dexter Gordon plays an aging sax player in Paris.