Movie Reviews

The Bank Job * * 1/2

This is a solid, no-nonsense heist thriller, yet one that ultimately fails to distinguish itself from the many others of the genre. It has none of the cinematic pyrotechnics of a Guy Ritchie picture, but it also lacks the stylish cool of a “Sexy Beast,” for example.

Australian director Roger Donaldson (“The Recruit,” “Thirteen Days”), working from a script by British veterans Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, has crafted a respectable mix of fact and fiction inspired by the 1971 robbery of a Lloyds Bank in London. Force-of-nature Jason Statham, star of the “Transporter” movies, plays the vividly named Terry Leather, a used-car dealer with a criminal past. He and some of his amateur thug pals get roped into robbing the bank’s vault by seductive ex-model Martine Love (the stunning Saffron Burrows), a friend of theirs from the neighborhood and a former flame of Terry’s before he settled down with a wife and a couple of kids. The requisite collection of colorful characters includes a smut peddler, a part-time porn star, a black-power con man and some seriously hypocritical aristocrats.

— Christy Lemire, AP