The English media have spent the better part of a year back-and-forthing over the true-or-false plot points of the 1971-set Bank Job, a movie about the plan to steal nudie pics of Princess Margaret from the bank vault in which they were stashed. More important, and about bloody time, The Bank Job is the first proper Jason Statham movie since his days banging about in Guy Ritchie’s early heists. Statham plays the used-car salesman lured into heading up the job; his model ex-girlfriend is Saffron Burrows, a good six inches taller than Statham; the blackmailing Black Power leader, Michael X, is Peter De Jersey, looking not a little like a beefier version of Jeffrey Wright’s Jean-Michel Basquiat. The rest of the cast consists of vaguely familiar British actors (hey, that’s the guy from Bright Young Things!) having a laugh--good thing too, as the whole thing’s such a giddy good-time mess that one could happily spend a year surveying the plot for gaping holes, never mind fact-checking its historical accuracy. Truth be told, Roger Donaldson’s latest makes Ocean’s Eleven look like a Maysles brothers documentary.

Review by Robert Wilonsky