The Bank Job

A trio of London down-and-outers (Jason Statham, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays) are enlisted by a friend (Saffron Burrows) to rob a Lloyds Bank vault, little suspecting there’s a hidden agenda involving blackmail, British intelligence and the royal family. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ script speculates on the story behind a still unsolved real-life robbery in September 1971—press coverage of which was mysteriously silenced by government edict. Whether the story is “true” or not, it makes for a ripping good yarn, with crosscurrents of political intrigue, police corruption, deceit and betrayal that reach in several different directions (the script even includes a murder in Trinidad that actually happened several months later). Roger Donaldson directs the complicated story at a tense gallop.