‘How to Rob a Bank’ Review: Can a Viral Heist Survive Its Own Algorithm
‘How to Rob a Bank’ lands in theaters on November 13, and it comes with an irresistible pitch for anyone who has ever fallen down a YouTube hole at 2 a.m. David Leitch, the director behind ‘Bullet Train’ and ‘The Fall Guy’, has built an R rated heist movie around a crew who treat bank jobs as content. Their channel shares the film’s title, and it teaches subscribers how to do exactly what the title promises.
Nicholas Hoult plays Ryan, the wolf masked face of the operation, with Anna Sawai as Emi, Pete Davidson as the former soldier Vince, and Rhenzy Feliz as the tech minded Hugo. In three months they hit fifteen banks and give much of the money away to charity. On the other side, John C. Reilly’s FBI agent West recruits Zoë Kravitz’s Reagan, a software engineer under house arrest, to track the crew down with an app she built.
Here is where I landed after watching it. The idea is better than the movie, and the film knows it, because it spends its best material up front and then coasts. The first robberies crackle with drones, body cameras and animal masks, and I was grinning. Then the structure settles into a pattern of heist, video, chase and speech, and the speeches arrive more often than the surprises.
The characters are the biggest problem, since most of them feel like slogans in tactical gear. Davidson is the exception, giving Vince real weight and the one emotional thread that actually lands. Kravitz is badly underused, though she and Reilly make a funny odd couple whenever the script lets them share a car or a kitchen. I would happily watch a smaller movie that is only about those two.
The message is plain to the point of being a bumper sticker, and the film repeats that banks are predatory without ever complicating the point. Christian Slater’s smug banker is a satisfying target, yet the mid film backstories for the crew feel bolted on just to make us care. The tone lurches between cartoon antics and sincere grief, and a late fourth wall break made me wince more than cheer.
There is craft here, and I do not want to bury it. Cinematographer Jonathan Sela moves between filmic footage for the characters’ private lives and glossy digital footage for their channel, and the contrast is clever. The car chase is a blast, a few camera moves genuinely impress, and the final heist, which the crew livestreams, has real energy. The shootouts are ordinary, though, and the ‘Point Break’ influence is so loud that the film practically hands you the comparison.
My verdict is that ‘How to Rob a Bank’ is a flashy, uneven crowd pleaser that wants to be a revolution and settles for being a decent night out. The first act and the Reilly and Kravitz scenes kept me invested, while the thin writing and repetitive middle kept me from loving it. I give it 6 out of 10.
Did this heist hold up for you, or is the ‘How to Rob a Bank’ channel one you would unsubscribe from, so tell me in the comments whether you agree with my verdict?
