Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
When Zoë Kravitz’s character, a former hacker on house arrest turned FBI consultant, asks John C. Reilly’s veteran detective what inspired him to join the force, his answer is simple: “I wanted to join after I saw ‘Point Break.’” It’s an apt comparison for a movie called “How to Rob a Bank,” which centers on a group of social media influencers whose YouTube channel, “Who’s Hungry?,” has recently gone viral for documenting their criminal exploits. They may not be wearing masks of former presidents and yelling “I’m not a crook!,” but they do sport bunny, wolf and sheep masks, which they subsequently hawk to their followers on Etsy. Even armed robbery, apparently, isn’t immune to the merchandising opportunities of influencer culture.
So goes the hyperkinetic absurdity of David Leitch’s inept crime thriller, a movie with a little too much on its mind and not nearly enough substance to make any of it stick. Somewhere beneath the car crashes, gunfire and social media posturing is a David-versus-Goliath, Robin Hood-style parable about class inequality, corporate greed and the failures of capitalism, though Leitch seems far more interested in staging the revolution than interrogating what inspired it. Call me crazy, but perhaps the guy who directed “Deadpool 2,” “Bullet Train” and “The Fall Guy” isn’t necessarily the best voice to deliver this kind of social commentary, especially when the movie itself is being released by one of the biggest corporations on the face of the planet. But hey, there are brief interludes where he actually lets his actors sit down and talk, a rarity in his particular brand of filmmaking.
Written by Mark Bianculli, “How to Rob a Bank” comes alive in spurts as we follow a ragtag group of content creators who have amassed a worldwide following by turning financial institutions into their own personal playgrounds. Their notoriety has reached such ridiculous heights that, during a high-speed police chase, they commandeer a random citizen’s vehicle, only for the driver to become positively ecstatic upon discovering that his favorite YouTubers are the ones carjacking him. Never mind the fact that I highly doubt YouTube would allow creators to livestream or upload footage of themselves robbing actual banks, but I suppose that’s the least of the movie’s concerns. The larger problem is that Leitch wants us to buy into the cultural phenomenon surrounding these criminals without doing much to establish why their message has resonated beyond the novelty of watching people commit felonies on camera.
And yet, for a movie that’s supposed to enrage and excite you, “How to Rob a Bank” lacks the swagger, sexiness and rebellious spirit that made something like “Point Break” so irresistible. With a runtime pushing beyond the two-hour mark, it also grows surprisingly stagnant for a movie that’s almost constantly in motion. I’ll admit, the setup nearly had me on the hook, particularly as these content creators, cosplaying as animals in bulletproof vests with cameras mounted to their weapons, position themselves as online activists fighting on behalf of the working class. Their videos preach about how the wealthiest one percent continue to prosper while everyone else suffers under a financial system designed to keep them down. They even provide explicit, step-by-step instructions on how to rob banks and get away with it, claiming that nearly 90% of robberies are successful. So why not give it a shot?
There’s an amusingly provocative idea here about the commodification of rebellion, where even acts of supposed resistance are packaged for clicks, subscribers and merchandise sales. These characters claim to despise the very capitalist machinery that has helped turn them into celebrities, and there’s certainly room for a biting satire about the contradictions of online activism. But Leitch doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring that hypocrisy. Instead, the movie takes their anti-establishment rhetoric largely at face value, occasionally gesturing toward economic injustice before returning to another elaborate chase sequence. For all its talk about disrupting the system, the film has remarkably little to say about how that system actually works.
The crew consists of Pittsburgh locals who each have their own personal grievances against the establishment, some more convincing than others. They’re led by Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), alongside his partner Emi (Anna Sawai, coming off her “Shogun” breakout in a frustratingly thankless role), his friend Vince (Pete Davidson), a military veteran, and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz), their social media manager responsible for manufacturing outrage and keeping the engagement numbers climbing. Meanwhile, their growing notoriety attracts the attention of a weary FBI agent named John (Reilly), who recruits a hacker played by Kravitz from house arrest purgatory to help bring them down. You’d be forgiven for thinking Kravitz was playing a watered-down version of her character from “Kimi,” though even that film had a better understanding of how technology could be used to generate suspense.
Much of what follows plays like a tepid procedural dressed up in the clothing of a slick action extravaganza, with the filmmakers struggling to find an emotional foundation beneath all the spectacle. A tragic backstory involving Ryan and Emi emerges as a rather transparent attempt to justify their bank-robbing crusade, but it’s introduced so awkwardly that it feels less like a natural extension of their motivations and more like a last-minute bid for sympathy. The same goes for Vince, whose personal struggles are meant to lend the group another layer of credibility, though neither Davidson nor the script has the dramatic juice to make us care. Sawai, meanwhile, is given precious little opportunity to develop Emi beyond her relationship with Ryan, which is especially disappointing given the emotional range she demonstrated in “Shogun.”
Leitch has always been more comfortable with the exhilarating, in-your-face acrobatics of an action picture than the quieter emotional beats that give those sequences meaning, and “How to Rob a Bank” does little to challenge that reputation. Every time the movie threatens to develop its characters beyond their grievances, another burst of frenetic chaos arrives to interrupt the proceedings. The dramatic interludes are reduced to brief three-to-five-minute pit stops between set pieces, leaving the actors to do much of the heavy lifting in a screenplay that mistakes tragic circumstances for actual character development. It’s not that an action movie needs to stop dead in its tracks to deliver a meaningful message, but there ought to be some connection between what these people believe, what they’re fighting for and the consequences of their actions.
To his credit, Leitch’s technical prowess is put to good use in several sequences, particularly a handful of high-speed chases complete with cars flipping, crashing and tumbling through the streets in slow motion. There are also some nifty bare-knuckle brawls that demonstrate his knack for staging physical confrontations with a sense of geography and impact. But once the punching and bruising subsides, the movie’s larger stance on America’s financial infrastructure feels dated and surprisingly toothless. It’s as though the filmmakers have assembled a collection of grievances about corporate greed, wealth inequality and institutional corruption without finding a fresh perspective through which to examine them. Even the soundtrack feels a little past its prime, with several conspicuous needle drops, including a Billie Eilish song that overstays its welcome, doing their best to inject an attitude the movie hasn’t earned.
Perhaps the strangest contradiction is how desperately “How to Rob a Bank” wants to be perceived as an act of cinematic rebellion while remaining so thoroughly conventional in its execution. Leitch is ostensibly shining a light on the institutions that define our culture, encouraging audiences to recognize the forces working against them and perhaps even feel energized enough to fight back. Yet there’s something amusing about watching an anti-capitalist blockbuster funded by Amazon, complete with a generous helping of product placement, attempt to sell us on the virtues of sticking it to corporate America. The film even finds time to offer a rather simplistic distinction between good cops and bad cops, as though it wants the provocative appeal of questioning authority without committing to anything that might genuinely complicate its worldview.
None of these contradictions would be particularly damning if the movie were simply more entertaining, or if its characters possessed enough personality to make their crusade worth following. But for all the noise and destruction, there’s precious little emotional attachment to what happens, and even less curiosity about the moral frustrations lurking beneath its premise. “How to Rob a Bank” wants to be a populist rallying cry, an irreverent social satire and a crowd-pleasing action spectacle all at once, but it never manages to reconcile those ambitions into something cohesive. Ultimately, it’s just a really loud movie flashing the word “anarchy” across the screen in the hopes that something, anything, will stick.
HOW TO ROB A BANK is now playing in theaters.