{"id":658269,"date":"2026-11-12T02:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T02:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/658269\/"},"modified":"2026-11-12T02:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T02:46:09","slug":"how-to-rob-a-bank-review-an-annoyingly-flashy-heist-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/658269\/","title":{"rendered":"‘How to Rob a Bank’ Review: An Annoyingly Flashy Heist Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere\u2019s a degree of second-hand embarrassment that comes from watching David Leitch<\/a>\u2019s Amazon-backed, influencer-age heist movie \u201cHow to Rob a Bank<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a film that bids so desperately for cultural relevance, stylistic cool and progressive brownie points that it trips on its own painstaking efforts to astoundingly lame results. What if Deadpool (Leitch directed one of those films, plus \u201cBullet Train\u201d and \u201cThe Fall Guy\u201d) broke the fourth wall to quack at us about his anti-capitalist revolt? Not that popular uprisings are evil, but this aggressively annoying, tonally berserk actioner serves mostly as a reminder that the revolution will not only be televised but digitally packaged and disseminated via the lousiest algorithm.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the title promises, YouTube-esque explainer videos featuring four gunmen in wolf masks bring the tips and tricks of bank robbing to a legion of online followers. Headed by the Marx-reading Ryan (Nicholas Hoult<\/a>), the anonymous crew posts videos of their real-life exploits, with pop-up graphics flashing over blown-out Go-Pro-esque footage of their stick-em-ups and getaways. The erratic opener is one such movie-within-the-movie, passing through the stages of a heist as designed by the crafty group \u2014 two minutes at the bank, an anonymous 9\/11 call about a mysterious package to divert police attention, and a speedy escape with motorbikes. All of the crew\u2019s robberies throughout the film play out in this twitchy meta-mode, which makes for a bewildering, sloppily overloaded delivery of thrills.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the reason for this rather ugly framing device is that the team strives to educate the masses in the art of bankrobbing at the expense of being caught. Their Youtube channel includes direct-to-camera rants delivered by their lupine avatars that preach their screw-the-man gospel, entreating their massive following to take back what\u2019s been denied them by the real fat cats and crooks. Most convincing is their claim that the government is too broken and incompetent to do anything about it, giving a Trump-era rationale to their ambitions. But the idea of sympathetic bank robbers flouting a system that only protects the rich and powerful isn\u2019t particularly novel \u2014 it\u2019s what underpins many a fine heist film. (There\u2019s even a shoutout to \u201cPoint Break\u201d in one scene.) Here, that messaging is spelled out in garish Jokerman typeface.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Ryan and his collaborators \u2014 wig-wearing decoy Emi (Anna Sawai), backup muscle Vince (Pete Davidson<\/a>) and hacker Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) \u2014 continue robbing banks and making content, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars along the way, FBI agent John West (a weirdly humorless John C. Reilly<\/a>) recruits deadpan tech-wiz Raegan (a quirked-up Zo\u00eb Kravitz) as his sidekick. Raegan is on house arrest after creating an illegal software that can triangulate someone\u2019s location by culling through online images, and but when John shows up at her Pittsburgh apartment \u2014 trying to ignore the Cheetos in her hair and the smell of weed \u2014 he promises to clear her charges in exchange for using her invention to track down the wolf-pack. <\/p>\n

\n\tTheir rapport gives the investigation a buddy-cop vibe that\u2019s meant to be cute and breezy, but Mark Bianculli\u2019s script relies on clunky wisecracks and labored eccentricities that flatten whatever low-bubbling chemistry the actors share. In any case, the intentionally odd pairing of pragmatic cop and stoner chick allows for thematically appropriate banter about the meaning of justice and peacekeeping in a chaotic and corrupt society.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to the film\u2019s press notes, the four bankrobbers are meant to be thinly drawn, so that the audience can more easily project themselves onto their respective plights: Vince is a war veteran with a young daughter; Hugo, the son of undocumented immigrants; Ryan and Emi, college sweethearts whose baby boy lost his life when a white-collar insurance scam bankrupted the couple, leaving them unable to pay for his treatment. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn other words, they\u2019re vessels for sadly familiar American grievances, though that doesn\u2019t excuse the perfunctory nature in which their stories are mapped out \u2014 or the late-breaking revelations that drop like campy soap-operatic twists. Or the drearily drawn-out emotional reckonings that feel almost offensively unearned (and wildly undeserving of not just one but two plaintive Billie Eillish needle-drops). In fact, at two hours, the whole thing plods along interminably \u2014 and in the end, it\u2019s even silly (or shameless) enough to make a case for its own self-importance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a degree of second-hand embarrassment that comes from watching David Leitch\u2019s Amazon-backed, influencer-age heist movie \u201cHow to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[158089,156,318558,117735,409,111,139,65081,69,22919,7064],"class_list":["post-658269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-david-leitch","tag-entertainment","tag-how-to-rob-a-bank","tag-john-c-reilly","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nicholas-hoult","tag-nz","tag-pete-davidson","tag-zoe-kravitz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}