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When a Lloyd's Bank at Baker Street and Marylebone Road in London was robbed in 1971, there were many curious elements to the case that were never really resolved.
The heist first came to light when it was still in progress, as a ham radio operator overheard the thieves and their lookout man communicating on their walkie-talkie radios. (In England, the crime is still known as the 'Walkie-Talkie' robbery.)
Search though they might, the police could not discover which bank was being robbed until the weekend was over, and then they found that while the Lloyd's Bank vault was intact, 268 safety deposit boxes in the building had been emptied. After a few days, the robbery disappeared from the news. As far as the public knew, nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime and none of the loot -- millions in jewels and cash -- from the boxes was recovered. What a mystery.
Until now.
The Bank Job, starring Jason Statham, recreates much of the famous theft and its wider historical and political ramifications.
Statham plays Terry Leather, a minor grifter with gambling debts and a car lot where nothing sells. Terry's lifelong friend Martine (Saffron Burrows) asks if he'd be interested in a robbery that would be a 'sure thing' -- she wants him to help her steal from safety deposit boxes at the bank and claims to have inside information about the building's security system. There's something dodgy about the entire set-up and Terry knows it, but he wants the job and the money to make a fresh start in life.
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Terry rounds up his mates (Daniel Mays and Stephen Campbell Moore) for the job. The men create an elaborate scheme to tunnel underneath a neighbouring store, and, with tension mounting in the story, they finally get into the safety deposit box area and clean out hundreds of boxes. Terry is suspicious of Martine's real motivation from the beginning, and when it turns out she's interested in the contents of only one box, the plot thickens. Turns out the real prize in this robbery are photos that could be used to blackmail someone in the Royal Family.
It's not Martine that organized the theft at all -- it's government spooks. They want the photos protected, and they want them taken away from a 'Black Power' charlatan who has used the photos to keep himself beyond the reach of the law.
And it doesn't stop there. The robbers unwittingly have taken away other compromising photos and a porn king's bribe ledger that lists all the corrupt cops in London. Our semi-innocent thieves go up against spies, gangsters, prostitutes, the aristocracy and forces darker and more malevolent than they could ever have imagined.
What jolly fun.
The Bank Job is both an adrenalin-fuelled heist tale, a hit of history and a background glance at a world that no longer exists. The story itself, which is complicated and violent, continues to fascinate people 35 years after the fact -- and this movie is still not the whole story. As for the era, it was a time before everyone knew that corruption and politics went hand in hand, before the Royal Family was in the full glare of the spotlight and before the British bobby carried a gun.
For a movie that carries warnings about nudity, violence and language, The Bank Job is an oddly innocent crime story.
(This film is rated 14-A)