Review: How to Rob a Bank

There are moments in How to Rob a Bank where it feels like Michael Bay suddenly developed a little social awareness. It has the same affection for beautiful people, expensive machinery, thundering music and things moving very quickly, except this time all that cinematic excess comes attached to righteous anger about healthcare, economic inequality and a system increasingly designed to keep people exactly where they are. The politics may be more thoughtful than your average studio action movie. The screenplay, unfortunately, isn’t.

Nicholas Hoult plays Ryan, the leader of a Pittsburgh bank-robbing crew who have turned their crimes into online content. Alongside his wife Emi (Anna Sawai), fellow veteran Vince (Pete Davidson) and tech expert Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz), Ryan robs financial institutions, gives away much of the money and broadcasts the group’s exploits online as a kind of digital-age Robin Hood movement. Their growing popularity eventually attracts FBI agent John West (John C. Reilly), who recruits hacker Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz) to help track them down.

It is a terrific setup for director David Leitch, whose career has increasingly become an experiment in finding new contexts for his particular brand of controlled chaos. How to Rob a Bank gives him plenty to play with, from cameras mounted seemingly everywhere to car chases, robberies and social-media videos that turn criminal activity into entertainment. Leitch directs the hell out of it. There’s a restless visual energy here that keeps the film compelling even when Mark Bianculli’s screenplay is actively working against it.

And that happens often.

The script has the strange habit of overexplaining ideas that need no explanation while leaving enormous pieces of character motivation hanging in the air. Its politics are earnest but frustratingly simple, dividing its world into victims of a broken system and the cartoonishly wealthy people exploiting them. Whenever the movie needs an emotional moment, the screenplay frequently reaches for melodrama instead of characterization. There are real ideas here about healthcare, debt, veterans and economic desperation, but the movie rarely trusts those ideas enough to complicate them.

Thankfully, Hoult and Davidson find people underneath all that exposition. Hoult remains one of those actors capable of suggesting thoughts the screenplay hasn’t bothered writing, giving Ryan a mixture of charisma, anger and sadness that makes his transformation into a revolutionary folk hero more convincing than it probably should be. Davidson is a surprise, bringing an unexpected vulnerability to Vince. His performance quietly suggests an entire life beyond what we are actually shown.

Kravitz has a much tougher assignment. Reagan is less a character than a collection of traits the screenplay hopes will eventually add up to one. Kravitz tries to give her some personality, and her scenes with Reilly occasionally generate an amusing odd-couple rhythm, but the character’s motivations become increasingly difficult to understand. It’s particularly strange in a movie otherwise determined to explain absolutely everything to us.

Still, Leitch keeps pushing forward. The robberies have personality, the car chases have weight, and the action possesses the clarity and physicality that distinguish his best work. Even the humor, wildly inconsistent as it is, lands often enough to keep things moving. At 122 minutes, this could easily have become exhausting. Instead, it has genuine propulsion.

That makes How to Rob a Bank an odd contradiction: a movie considerably smarter in conception than execution, and considerably better directed than written. Its anger at the modern economic system feels sincere, even when its understanding of that system rarely extends beyond slogans. Yet there’s something undeniably entertaining about watching Leitch turn that frustration into cinematic spectacle.

The movie may not know exactly what revolution it wants to start. It does, however, know how to blow through the front doors.

3/5