Banks are where the money is, the old quick-cash saying goes (attributed to robber Willie Sutton). But in the livestream age, clicks are a currency you don’t need to break the law to accumulate. And yet the energetic gang of camera-ready young smash-and-grabbers of “How to Rob a Bank” — led by a blond, online-savvy Nicholas Hoult — want both paper and page views, so they can remind everyone who the real thief is: a greedy socioeconomic apparatus stacked against them.
Et tu, Jeff Bezos? (Amazon MGM is the film’s studio.) Don’t get your hopes up. The movie’s fight-the-power appeal lasts about as long as a TikTok clip before succumbing to dull character tropes and the decidedly unanarchic blahs of action-comedy mechanics. No one’s anti-establishment heart is getting stolen here, just your time.
The premise of Mark Bianculli’s screenplay tries to reposition content creators as modern-day Robin Hoods. Ryan (Hoult) and his team — partner Emi (Anna Sawai), army vet pal Vince (Pete Davidson) and tech whiz Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) — film their every job, editing the crimes like they were extreme sports, then uploading them as irreverent, statistic-laden tutorials on how to take advantage of capitalism.
As their fan base grows (a “support” montage includes cameo-ing podcasters like Scott Galloway and the “Flagrant” hosts), the gang incurs the focused ire of grizzled FBI agent John West (a regrettably muted John C. Reilly). His secret weapon is a convicted hacker with pattern recognition skills named Reagan, a role so unimaginatively conceived that Zoë Kravitz seems like she was pulled from an improv night to cosplay a law enforcement sidekick.
The generic investigative side of the equation wouldn’t matter, though, if our antiheroes hadn’t been drawn so thinly to begin with. Guess what? Ryan’s aggressive, eat-the-rich online persona is offset by a quieter, personal agony. Each rebel in the quartet gets a one-scene brushstroke version detailing their private heartache — which isn’t the same as forging memorable characters. (That requires scenes, not montages.)
Hoult is always watchable as a brooding rogue, but his charisma suffers underneath the wolf mask he often wears. Davidson — the most interesting of the foursome, despite his character getting the most melodramatic treatment — will surely one day find a role worthy of his melancholy misfit appeal. Director David Leitch (“Bullet Train”) knows how to stage a stunt, but overall, he is not the guy to meld adrenalized chaos and issue-driven drama, much less keep a poorly plotted tale from losing steam as it careens toward its final confrontation.
A missed opportunity? Sure. But “How to Rob a Bank” is also low-key tragic when you consider how far the craft of heist movies has fallen. It’s not so much the noisy, unclever brazenness, a tone existing at the opposite end of the spectrum from the wordless virtuosity that practically invented the genre in 1955’s “Rififi.”
What’s being ignored is the weaving of microdramas into the equation, the human stuff that makes pulling something off so nerve-racking and delicious. “How to Rob a Bank” may claim to care about the dehumanizing economics that drive people to crime, but its messaging is little more than a flashy Snapchat filter, a trite diversion.
‘How to Rob a Bank’
Rated: R, for language, some violence and brief drug use
Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, Nov. 13 in wide release
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com
