M-A-D #17: "The Bank Job" (2008)

For a while, it seemed like everybody I knew had seen "The Bank Job."

Friends, family, co-workers. Even acquaintances who don't normally go to or talk about movies very much.

I'd meant to see it but didn't, somehow, and seemingly everybody around me wanted to talk about it and tell me what a good movie they thought it was.

And now, having finally seen it on video, I agree. It's good.

Not "really good." Not "very good." Just flat "good," and perhaps a hair above "kinda good."

It's a Brit caper, very loosely based on a robbery that occurred in London in 1971, but despite the clothes, the hairstyles and lots of muttonchops, the film feels extremely contemporary.

Jason Statham plays a small-time grifter/car salesman named Terry Leather ("yeah, baby, yeah!") who gets roped into a bigger, titular scheme by stoolie-for-MI:5 Saffron Burrows (as Martine Love -- "oh, behave"). Leather puts together a crack team of amateurs, staffed by Brit types -- the stuffy old con man; the mechanical expert; the smoothy photographer; and of course a cockney simp who from his first scene ought to be wearing a T-shirt with iron-on letters that read, "I'm The Idiot Who's Gonna to Screw The Whole Thing Up!" (see if you can't spot him in the photo above)

What, you say? Where's the ska-loving, joke-cracking, malaprop-prone Jamaican who never takes off his shades, drives the van and dies nobly? Looks like they forgot him.

But caricatures are represented here by a side-figure, a black militant named ... Michael X ... (!) ... a thuggy politico-pimp-pusher who always seems like he should be somewhere else -- namely chasing Roger Moore's James Bond around the Everglades in a speedboat or something.

Things heat up a little toward the end (when it seems representatives from nearly every British crime syndicate and law enforcement agency has kinky bondage photos of themselves they need to protect) but it's hard to get very worked up about much other than Burrows, sultry and six feet tall in a leather trench coat, boots and saucer-sized shades. Otherwise "The Bank Job" is a lot like "Sexy Beast" minus the sexy and most of the beast.