Dave Shilling (Daniel Mays, left), Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), Kevin Swain (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Terry (Jason Statham) plan a bank job.
Making the best of things while doubtlessly hunting for another breakout movie like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Brit bruiser Jason Statham (The Transporter) turns up under less hip, edgy circumstances in The Bank Job playing Terry, a smalltime crook and car dealer so mired in debt that he's about to lose his kneecaps to gangsters.
Martine (Saffron Burrows) -- a former model and an old flame from the old neighborhood -- arrives just in time to suggest a criminal proposition that leads Terry to join a team of mostly amateur crooks planning to tunnel under a London shop and unburden its safe deposit boxes.
Naturally, the events that follow in the film, directed by Roger Donaldson (a long way from No Way Out) and inspired by the daring 1971 robbery at Lloyds Bank in London, offers obligatory twists and revelations of dark ulterior motives and conspiratorial cover-ups, but the pile-up of dazzle laid on by Donaldson and plot corkscrews supplied by screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais aren't fast nor offbeat enough to lift the movie out of the realm of a very competent but not especially riveting heist flick.
Dave (Daniel Mays, above) and Terry (Jason Statham) get to work.
Statham, looking and moving like a bullet, does all he's required to do in a movie that surrounds him with some top British acting talent including David Suchet and Stephen Campbell Moore.
But, when the smoke clears, the body count is tallied and the baddies get called out, it's hard to escape the been-there, done-that air of The Bank Job.
It feels like a crime caper Vin Diesel might have given a pass.
