How To Rob a Bank
Review by Mark Woodring
From the director of Bullet Train and The Fall Guy…
That should be enough, right?
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below. Remember, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
122 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Mark Bianculli
Directed by David Leitch
Synopsis:
Bank robbers are posting their heists on social media, causing police to chase them.
… well, it’s not.
(Look, I haven’t written a review like this in… well… ever, I think, so I’m as surprised as you are by what you’re about to read.)
Sure, director David Leitch can string together a hell of a sequence of action scenes. They’re great. At times, the construction of the film brought to mind the works of Guy Ritchie, but with a modern spin, as opposed to Ritchie’s more conventional setting and approaches.
The film is very well acted, with even the usually annoying Pete Davidson carrying his load quite well. The characters are developed just enough to keep the audience interested.
So from the aspect of being a popcorn-munching spectacle, How To Rob a Bank delivers.
But…
… remember when Fight Club came out, and people started losing their minds about how incredible and timely it was, and half the commentary was about joining Project Mayhem, while the other half was mocking them about being the very snowflakes the movie purported to be making fun of?
Of the recent One Battle After Another, which was inexplicably lauded as a seminal piece of cinema, but which at least presented its lunacy with some sense of surrealism in terms of its characters and events?
How To Rob a Bank is this year’s One Battle After Another, and by that, I mean people will likely shower the film with praise for no reason other than its all-too-blatant messaging.
The film is nothing more than Marxist Agitprop, designed to rile up the “lower classes.” It’s a distraction to give them something to be angry about.
I hate when reviewers use pretentious language like this, but damn it, it fits.
By that, I mean that there will be a not-inconsiderable percentage of individuals who, like the “Project Mayhem” wannabes, will envision themselves masking up “getting theirs.”
And they’ll be just as stupid and wrong as the Fight Club-ers were.
I can’t believe I saw a headline that said “There’s never been a better time for movie like this.”
To be clear, this film offers nothing but highly produced cotton candy philosophy designed to cater to the lowest common denominator, and if it’s not intended to actually incite actions akin to those depicted in the film, then it’s sure doing so accidentally to an alarming degree.
I recall a few years back when a film called The Hunt was delayed and received incredibly negative coverage simply for the (long-utilized and patently ridiculous) premise, which prompted death threats towards the filmmakers.
How To Rob a Bank is, depending on your POV, far worse in terms of its possible effect on behavior than that film ever would have had.
The overt preachiness (to put it kindly) of the third act, regardless of whether you believe the movie makes some good points or not (it does, BTW), undercuts the otherwise respectable action credentials it had amassed up to that point. There is a way to message without preaching, to educate without haranguing, but How To Rob a Bank eschews its otherwise solid entertainment core for a ham-fisted pillorying of capitalism in favor of anarchy.
And, not to spoil it, but even the protagonists aren’t as altruistic as they might seem. Oftentimes, their methodology mirrors that of drug cartels in Central and South America in their relations with the community.
I won’t tell you not to see this one, as it has a lot going for it, but I will tell you to go in knowing that you will be lectured at and harassed without any nuance whatsoever.
I pity those who end up with an audience like the one I saw this with, who actively cheered and hollered when the film ended.
How To Rob a Bank breaks into theaters Friday, November 13,and stars Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, John C. Reilly, Pete Davidson, Tati Gabrielle, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, and Christian Slater.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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