I’ve gotta say, this really impressed me. I’ve been terrible about keeping up with my reviews this past week and it reached the point on this one that I was thinking for the first half hour how ever I was going to come up with something to say about it, so little did I expect to enjoy it. I knew the basic story that it’s based on – that a bank robbery took an unexpected turn when the robbers came across compromising photographs of a Royal – and due to my prejudice against Jason Statham I really didn’t hold out a lot of hope for coming out of the movie much wiser.

Sure enough, at the 30 minute mark they are breaking into said bank – but it’s there that I began to notice one of the film’s biggest strengths. Though it felt like quite a meandering set-up to that “finally in the bank” moment, once there, it’s surprising how fast they seem to have got there and how fast things begin to happen that are at once unexpected and occasionally quite nasty. The screenplay is pure, no nonsense, procedural heist material but I feel like it does “the guilty” as they are called in the end credits “justice” for want of a better word. The Statham factor slips ever so slightly in an action sequence towards the end (I think him kicking a brick out of a wall to throw at someone was where I drew the line) but he’s actually mostly okay here. The look and feel is more timeless than perfect period recreation like “American Gangster” and the like, but it works. It’s a movie I’ll watch again for sure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 1:27 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as British, heist, true story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.