The Bank Job: Critic Reviews

Watching The Bank Job, you buy the heist, and you also buy the entertaining layer cake of British society -- the black radicals, smut lords, and MI5 agents who treat cops like janitors, all fighting for their piece of the action.

The workmanlike title The Bank Job is a nice fit for this wham-bam caper flick.

Well-paced, smartly told and unpretentious, this solid British heist thriller also has moments of invention and imagination

What makes director Roger Donaldson's movie greater than zany heist fare is that this particular robbery really happened and that this episode illuminated an almost moral clash between the haves and the have-nots of Great Britain.

It's something new for heist pictures: a movie that can't even rip off its predecessor with any panache.

The Bank Job engages us fully with a tale that's well-fashioned more than anything else, a fascinating study of morality at several levels of English society, and of honor, or the lack of it, among implausibly likable thieves.

Roger Donaldson, the Australian-born director who, in recent years, has become the kind of solid pro that Hollywood developed in the nineteen-thirties and forties, has made a straightforward, tight-knit crime thriller.

No worse than its generic title. And no better.

Any heist film containing the line 'I will not be lectured by the porn king of Soho!' is on the right track.

Fascinating.

All in all, the film written by Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais feels both absolutely of the 1970s and absolutely fresh.

Director Roger Donaldson commendably avoids the violence-soaked artiness of Guy Ritchie's crime yarns, but fails to find a strong arc of action through the cluttered, sometimes confusing story.

A tight, classic-feeling film about losers banding together for one big score, then scrambling furiously as they realize they're in over their heads. It's fast, nifty, sharp and sweet.

It gets right the twists, the humor, the tension, the sexiness and, yes, the violence of a really fun, taut British thriller.

The Bank Job shapes up as one of the liveliest entertainments of the year and, in its twisted way, a genuine feel-good movie.

An engrossing if underwhelming period thriller.

With its cockneys and coppers and the caper that comes a cropper, the movie is fully engaging on several levels.

The Bank Job is a solidly built and entertaining Brit B-movie about a heist that goes wrong. And right.

This may be just another bank job, like many you've seen before, but here's the payoff: it's a heist that actually looks real for once.

The story is filled with new dimensions that separate it from a run-of-the-mill heist flick.

Thanks to the twin pens of screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, what a jam-packed and misanthropic fiction this is.

You need the right actors to make a movie as intelligent and as engaging as this one is, and [director] Donaldson knows how to make each character in this rather complex ensemble seem whole and distinct.

The Bank Job is smart, well-paced, exciting entertainment for adults -- something that is more of a rarity than it should be.

This sluggishly paced caper flick fails to score.

It's all sufficiently brisk and engaging as it's going on, and afterward you certainly won't feel ripped off. But you won't feel any differently, either.