The Bank Job
Director: Roger Donaldson
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 1.5
An amateur thief/family man (Jason Statham, looking like Michael Chiklis with tons of stubble) gets recruited by a slinky brunette (Saffron Burrows, deliciously emaciated) to rob Lloyd's Bank - he thinks it's for the money, but it's really for Burrows (working for MI5) to recover incriminating photos of a member of the Royal Family held in one of the safety deposit boxes. As a basic genre picture it's efficiently told but hardly surprising, innovative or exceptionally interesting - it goes from A to B to C, just as it has in so many other, similar movies. Someone took the story, with its roots in fact, and threw them into the Heist Scenario Generator, complete with the Close Calls macro and Grittiness plug-in, clicked "Okay" and came up with a script.
