Movie marketing is all about coaxing potential audiences off the couch and into the theater. Sometimes the ads (trailers or TV commercials) can be misleading, causing a disconnect between expectations and the finished product. Then there’s the marketing for How To Rob A Bank, which tells you exactly what the film is about.
The problem is: there’s nothing else to the movie.
The premise is simple and straightforward: Agent John West (John C. Reilly, looking lost) is desperately trying to chase a gang of young, social media savvy bank robbers. They’ve committed more than a dozen armed robberies and while their dollar count is high, their online following is where the true muscle is. Early in the film, the gang’s leader Ryan (Nicholas Hoult) marvels when he’s told by tech guy Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) that they’ve broken past 900 million.
But it’s not dollars. It’s views (across all major platforms, of course).
The mystery, if there can be said to be one, is why the robbers dedicate so much time and energy to riling up the general masses with their Robin Hood story of stealing from rich, capitalistic banks, rather than simply absconding with the dough and staying quiet.
Initially it seems as though an outsider’s perspective is required, which is why Agent West recruits Zoë Kravitz‘s Reagan Gardner, a woman who created a tracking program to find her ex, which was used by some bad people to do some bad things (the details are left deliberately unclear because the movie doesn’t care about her backstory or, more broadly speaking, the character, in general). The point is: Reagan is on month ten of house arrest, unable to get to her favourite coffee shop, so she jumps at the chance to help West, though she’s not above mentioning the seemingly altruistic motives of the criminals she’s helping to take down.
And therein lies one of How To Rob A Bank‘s two big problems. As scripted by Mark Bianculli, the film thinks it’s making some grand statement about how the little people are being screwed over by big corporations (in this case: the banking industry). The viral social media campaign of ‘The Wolf Pack’ is popular principally because they appeal to this “every man” notion that regardless how hard any of us are working – bank tellers, security guards, teachers, or parents – we’ll never be rich and we’ll always be exploited by millionaires and companies.
It’s a bit of a “duh” thesis, but in the world of the film, it’s enough to incite a full blown proletariat revolution.
The problem is that Agent West, a good old boy who’s completely out of touch with the younger generation, is routinely propped up as the hero of the tale. When he’s confronted by Ryan after a robbery-turned-car-chase, West meekly mumbles (at gunpoint and on camera), that he’s just doing his job. He’s presented as a buffoon and widely mocked in the Wolf Pack’s next video, but How To Rob A Bank still portrays him as the guy who kinda/sorta has it right, he just needs to learn a lesson by the end of the movie (there’s a face palm moment in the climax when he marvels that perhaps he’s been protecting the wrong guys the whole time and it’s presently so earnestly, it should be comedy…but it’s not).
The second problem is that the film IS the marketing. If you’ve seen an ad for the film, then you’ve seen already seen the film. There’s nothing else to it. A series of “high octane” heists, a slight sob backstory for some (but not all?) of the criminals so that we understand that they’re good people who have been pushed to the extreme, and a finale straight out of Mr. Robot by way of Fight Club (both better texts).
Oh, and there’s a mention of Point Break to make sure you get the gist.
To be clear, How To Rob A Bank isn’t a bad film. It’s mostly serviceable entertainment and the cast is stacked. But director David Leitch can’t seem to get the adrenaline pumping in the action sequences, and even folks like Reilly and Hoult can’t elevate the generic material. The result is a film that feels like it was made for streaming, which is ironic because it’s from Amazon MGM and will likely already be streaming by the time you finish reading this. At just over two hours, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon or an evening, but this feels like the quintessential definition of a hangover movie or a lazy afternoon on the couch.
As characters in the film are apt to say, your time and money is precious. Which means you probably have better things to do than spend it on a trip to theaters to see this average action comedy.
Other Observations:
- The film’s biggest sin is introducing Kravitz as if she’s a vital character in the film, and then abandoning her around the halfway point. It’s completely unclear why she’s still involved if her tech has already served its purpose, leaving the actress with little to do other than eat her way through the rest of the film. Sure, it kinda funny, but it’s also just a riff on Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven, a 25 year old film.
- The editing is standard for action movies, though it has its highs and lows. The way the social media clips are engineered feels appropriately ADHD and extremely frenetic (so that works), but the climax basically involves Agent West teleporting from the top of a parking garage to the ground level in the time it takes for Ryan to speed down in a car, which…makes no sense (so that doesn’t work).
- The saccharine backstory for Hoult and his girlfriend Emi (Anna Sawai), which involves a greedy bank manager played by Christian Slater, has its finger on the pulse of the woes of the US medical system. It’s obviously melodramatic, but still effective.
- On the flip side, Vince’s (Pete Davidson) backstory is a triple whammy of exploitative cliches: he’s an injured vet, who has a terminal illness, and has an adorable young child who can only sleep when he’s there to sing to them. It’s desperately manipulative, and while Davidson does a reasonable job with all of the melodrama, even casual viewers will have little difficulty sussing out where this storyline is headed.
- Sidebar: negative points for hiring Tati Gabrielle as Davidson’s underdeveloped girlfriend and then utterly wasting her in a thankless role.
Final rating: 2.5/5
How To Rob A Bank is playing in theaters Nov 13
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