A Film Canon

Less a docudrama than the sleazy, lurid, consistently climactic recreation that might be expected to accompany a tabloid news broadcast, The Bank Job is loosely based on the 1971 Baker Street Robbery, in which a group of petty criminals successfully broke into a bank, only to discover that the contents of the safety deposit boxes they confiscated were desperately wanted by a whole bevy of London criminal and administrative figures. The most critical box contained photographs of Princess Margaret engaging in compromising sexual acts, and was being held by Michael X, a radical, anti-imperialist Trinidadian, as blackmail - and so the film quite eloquently captures the peculiar British proclivity for tabloid scandal as a fascination with royal scandal, or a prescience that the very existence of royalty is a kind of ongoing scandal, publically sanctioned pornography. At the same time, the centrifugal energy that generally characterises the opening act of a heist film is relegated to the third, as the criminals, led by car salesman Terry (Jason Statham), devote considerably more logistical and aesthetic ingenuity to retaining the money than to stealing it, in a strikingly literal instance of the heist genre's perennial reminder that possession is nine-tenths of the law, as well as its conflation of heist-logistics with unremunerated labor. Throughout, Roger Donaldson favors oblique angles, which give the entire film the feel of a hastily, covertly snapped photograph - how a paparazzo might shoot the past - as well as a warm, summery palette, which both evokes the slight bleeding of blurred, fetid newsprint, and casts a distant, tropical sheen from the imperial fringes that drive the action. As a classical heist film made for a contemporary action demographic, then, it's a considerable achievement, grafting the verbal energy of 90s Cool Brittania onto the visceral intensity of 60s kitchen-sink realism, for an eccentric, hidden history of hyper-kinetic action aesthetics.