/ 18 July 2008

Lock, stock and wild speculation

ON CIRCUIT: The Bank Job, Drillbit Taylor and Journey to the Centre of the Earth are reviewed.

In 1971, a branch of Lloyds Bank in Baker Street, London, was robbed. This became known as “the walkie-talkie robbery”, because a shortwave-radio enthusiast happened to overhear and record their walkie-talkie conversation while the robbery was under way. Not that that made much difference. Unlike in the film account, the police simply told the man to record it all, and left it at that until it was too late.

The thieves tunnelled into the bank’s vault from a nearby shop, and got away with money and goods valued at somewhere between £400 000 and £4-million. The amount is unclear because they robbed the safety-deposit boxes in the bank, and who knows what they held? As one character in the movie account of these events has it, certain things are put into safety-deposit boxes precisely to avoid other people knowing what those things are. (The taxman, for one.) Certainly, the fact is that fewer than 100 people reported to the police what their boxes had contained.

This is the tale told in The Bank Job, and, because the crime has never been solved, telling that tale requires a fair amount of speculation — and, in fact, a great deal of imaginative reconstruction. The movie has to explain what happened and why the criminals were never caught, or, at least, if they were caught, why their capture was not made public. Naturally, it couldn’t simply be a matter of the police, for once, finding themselves unable to nab the criminals; there has to be a complex web of conspiracy, reaching up to the highest levels of society, to explore. This makes for a good movie plot, with the contents of the safety-deposit boxes playing an important role. Nothing like a mystery to explain a mystery.

The movie’s version goes, or at least starts, like this. Terry (Jason Statham) is an East End car dealer and minor criminal who owes some big crime boss a lot of money. This is one of the reasons he succumbs to the suggestion of a beautiful woman called Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), who has news of a time at which it would be very advantageous to rob a certain bank. She has been put up to this by some state spooks, and here the conspiracy stuff comes in.

They are looking for something very specific, an idea provided by a long-standing rumour about a member of the royal family that did once the rounds in Britain. This in turn relates to the real historical figure of Michael X, so-named (by himself) to declare his affinity with the American activist Malcolm X, but in fact something of a crook — he was charged with extortion in Britain (bail paid by John Lennon, incidentally) and was later executed in Trinidad for murder. VS Naipaul, appropriately enough, wrote an essay about him and later a novel, Guerrillas, with a distinct resonance of X’s story.

The Bank Job rather fudges the facts here, but that’s not of much consequence unless one is concerned to protect Michael X’s posthumous reputation. This weave of history, rumour, speculation and outright invention does not, unfortunately, really play very convincingly or rivetingly on screen. For a “true story”, albeit a speculation, it reproduces a large number of the clichés of the kind of caper movie we’ve seen many times. The way the filmmakers try to ratchet up the tension, with the music urgently playing along, is ham-fisted. The language, too, seems to be trying a little too hard to convey the flavour of the early 1970s in Cockneyland — the robbers are repeatedly referred to as “villains”, for instance, in an insistent instance of supposedly historic verisimilitude.

The acting, with partial exceptions, is rather flat and rudimentary, or simply stereotyped. It’s all a bit too Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to feel quite real. The main exception on the acting front is Burrows, who is not given much beyond the ordinary and the expected to do, but at least has a notable (and rather noble) presence, with the kind of sadness behind her eyes that gives Charlotte Rampling the appearance of such depth on screen. I believed in her.

The rest, though, from accomplices to spooks to coppers to porn kings to Lord Mountbatten, are broad-stroke stereotypes. Only Statham, as the central figure and some kind of hero, is provided with a bit of complexity to chew on, but it’s complexity of a rather stereotyped kind. And he comes with the baggage of his previous nonsense-thrillers, which hardly incline one to take him seriously. Perhaps he does go a little deeper into a character here — but not much.

Meanwhile, his two-day growth of beard manages to stay remarkably trim (neither too long nor too short) and consistent over the time-period covered. Perhaps, while all that digging underground was taking place, he kept a pair of clippers on hand — or they were hidden in the glove compartment of the getaway van. Now that’s a forward-thinking villain for you.

Drillbit Taylor
Judd Apatow’s reputation as Hollywood’s new king of comedy looks set to take a mauling with this release, a knockabout tale of bullied teenagers (Nate Hartley and Troy Gentile) and the deadbeat with delusions of grandeur (Owen Wilson) who comes to their rescue. This bears a passing resemblance to Superbad, but lacks that film’s dash and confidence, wandering uncertainly from one comic setpiece to the next. The final bell can’t come soon enough. — Xan Brooks