“The Bank Job” (2008)

It is not surprising that “The Bank Job” plays like cheesy 1970s British television, a cross between a sit com and a T & A friendly cop show.  Nominally based on what its makers claim is a true story - though the end credits state, with tongue firmly in cheek, that “names have been changed to protect the guilty” - it is written by a couple of veterans best known for penning the likes of “Porridge” and “The Likely Lads”.  Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are both 71 years old and their talent is firmly grounded way, way back last century.

Given that the film is set in the mid-70s it might have made sense to employ a couple of ancient geezers who knew the decade first hand.  Perhaps Guy Ritchie or an up and coming director could have breathed some life into their cliche ridden script for certainly the material is pure gold.  Our own Roger Donaldson is not up to the challenge however, and judging by the cut-price production values he didn’t have much of a budget even to give it a try.

Still, the basic story remains a good one.  It involves a group of amateur London criminals who are convinced by a formerly local beauty to attempt a daring raid on the deposit boxes of Lloyds bank.  What they don’t know is that they are being set up by one or more branches of the Secret Service who are after the contents of a particular box, a group of pornographic photos featuring a certain member of the royal family.  The snaps are being used in a black mail scheme by a Jamaican muslim activist whose politics are a front for drug running and prostitution.

Outside of the stunning cheek bones of Saffron Burrows the cast have the type of faces that are half familiar from the 1980s small screen or various under the radar b-pictures.  Paul Bowles, who was once ‘to the manor born’, plays the head of M15 or M16 with same kind of haughty intolerance he used to reserve exclusively for Penelope Keith and at the other end of the class spectrum there are plenty of loveable cockneies who sound like they started their career on “Eastenders” and haven’t progressed very far beyond it.

However superficial the dialogue and characterisation at least “The Bank Job” is well paced.  Unconcerned with doing anything other than entertaining on the most surface of levels, devoid of ideas or morals or an idelogical position much beyond a cheerful celebration of its scalawag thieves, it cannot quite count as satire even if it seemingly condemns corruption in some very high places.  Clements and La Frenais lose no opportunity to write scenes where women take their tops off, or toffy nosed aristocrats get a good whipping.  They are aided and abetted by New Zealand’s finest old school proponent of politically incorrect fimmaking.

I greatly enjoyed “The Bank Job”.  Laughed all the way through it, in fact.  Was a guilty pleasure to watch Saffron play femme fatale and an even guiltier one to see how a couple of geriatric honkeys conceive of a politicised black man with a taste for the white women.  It’s just a shame it wasn’t made by someone with a bit of ambition.