With a title as seemingly trite as The Bank Job and a cast spearheaded by B-films action hero Jason Statham, one might have expected this to be a routine bank caper involving a Transporter pulling off something of an Italian Job. But it isn’t – it is a film that goes far beyond your simplistic expectations. You would have seen scores, even hundreds, of bank heist films, but this one seems real. It does, because it is a fictionalised account of a real event. But there have been others too of the type, you might argue. The answer to that would be yes, but this one has a taut script made even more gripping with ruthlessly efficient editing. Worth a watch.
The Bank Job is based on the 1971 Baker Street robbery in central London, from which the money and valuables stolen were never recovered. The story apparently remained in the cans as a result of a D-Notice (now known as a DA-defence advisory-Notice) on basis of which the government of the day gagged the news media in order to protect a prominent member of the British royal family. This film is Roger Donaldson’s glossy cinematic rendition of the robbery itself, the episodes leading to and surrounding the event, as also the lives and times of the day. All done with immaculate subtlety.
What is known for certain is that a gang tunnelled 40 ft into a branch of Lloyds Bank at the junction between Baker Street and Marylebone Road in London on the night of September 11, 1971. The gang, who emptied the safe deposit boxes, made it to the vault from a leather goods shop named Le Sac, two doors down from the bank, that they had rented. A radio ham operator by the name of Robert Rowlands overheard conversations made over walkie-talkies between the robbers and their rooftop lookout. It was a fluke, but he recorded the exchanges and contacted the police even as the robbery was in progress. The police failed to reach the bank in time – there were over 100 banks in the target area. The robbery made headlines on September 13 and the last of the reports ran on September 16. The British government apparently issued a D-Notice on the coverage in the news media. The reason was never elaborated. Silence prevailed.
One of the producers of the film, George McIndoe, perchance met two of the gang members who executed the biggest bank robbery in British history. One of the two was a man on whom the primary character of the film – Terry Leather – is based. The rest of the story is a yarn spun by the two screenwriters.
Terry Leather (Statham) is a rough-hewn, granite-faced used car salesman with a dodgy past who is desperately trying to get his act together with his wife and two daughters. One bad morning of being threatened by debt-collectors, Terry is lured into the plot by Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), a former heart-throb and model who is trying to wriggle out of a drug rap. Martine comes up with a foolproof plan of a hit on a bank located in London's Baker Street. A roomful of safe deposit boxes worth millions in cash and jewellery sounds too good an opportunity to let go abegging. Terry and his team, however, have no inkling that the room is actually a Pandora’s box of illicit secrets that would ensnare them in a deathly and deceitful web of unspeakable secrets woven together by criminals, police officers, politicians and the above-board royal family. The lower class stiffs also have no idea that they are being set up as fall guys by men with impeccable accents and bespoke suits.
The film sets itself apart from other bank heist films in a number of ways. There are no nattily dressed robbers. There are no fancy gadgets and outlandish gizmos. There is no impregnable security system that would make Mission Impossible look like a walk in the park. Unlike Oceans’s Eleven, this is not a film where it takes 70 minutes of cinematic time for the robbers to stitch together a devious plan for a 5-minute bank robbery. It takes time for Terry and his team to complete their act, and this is over midway through the film. This heist story is not just about the heist itself, it is also the about turn of events in the aftermath and how matters go out of control. There are a lot of sarcastic jibes at British aristocracy and monarchy specifically, humour that flows as if in angry and resentful undercurrents. Yes, it is not a concoction where Alec Guinness of The Lavender Hill Mob meets Clive Owen of Inside Man.
Many American critics dismissed the flick. But thankfully, there, the film was not made by an American which might have made the storyline being lost in the accents. It is refreshingly British – there is no scope, for instance, of a man from northeast England speaking with a heavy Texan drawl. So, when Terry wants just-included teammate Eddie Burton (Michael Jibson) to clamber up to the roof of an opposite building to keep a look-out, he is told to say that he is from Liverpool. “But I don’t have a Liverpool accent,” he protests. “Then don’t talk to anyone, Eddie,” Terry quips.
But there are flaws – mostly of the anachronistic type. You see VISA card labels on the panes of shops, though it was Barclaycard at the time. There is a mention of Rambo, though the film was made more than a decade later. There are are mistakes with police car makes and numberplates. You also have Trinidadian Michael X (Peter de Jersey) speaking with such a heavy Jamaican accent that you wonder if it is Michael Holding in disguise.
Once again these are minor directorial goof-ups that you are likely to overlook given the gripping pace of the film. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have stitched together a screenplay that is taut, to put it simply. John Gilbert’s ruthless editing does full justice to the writers. This is where the film’s real strength lies – it does not waste time.
Jason Statham, who made a name for himself in the Guy Ritchie films Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, subsequently fell into his Transporter days and had little to show as an actor, except for maybe in London. Statham slips into the role of Terry Leather with consummate ease, with his no-nonsense visage and raspy intonation of a cockney accent. Even for once you don’t think that Statham is a misfit in the role. He is the only thickset actor you can think of with a bald patch who can look handsome, intense and brooding at the same time. He is so good at it, you don’t notice.
At the end of the day, you know that part of the story is true and part imagination. But the narrative is put together in such craftful a way that you don’t know where fact ends and fiction begins. Just for the record – scrawled inside the Llyods Bank walls, the police found that September Sunday of 1971, were the words of the Baker Street irregular robbers: "Let Sherlock Holmes try to solve this."
