★★ (2 out of 4)
If you can get past the hypocrisy of an anti-capitalist action ride coming from the capitalist castle of Amazon, you might steal a few minutes of fun from “How to Rob a Bank.” But it will take a lot of denial as more moolah rolls in for Team Jeff Bezos. Billionaire one-percenters run everything now, in case you hadn’t heard.
There’s a lesson to be learned here: forget OnlyFans; a better way to steal money is to keep your clothes on and just rob banks. There’s more. You also need to win views on social media and the way to do that is to teach other people your MO. How TikTok can you get?
Such is the soft eat-the-rich center of “How to Rob a Bank,” now exclusively in theaters where future thieves are advised to take notes. And besides, “Bullet Train” director David Leitch makes bank robbing look way cool, or at least he thinks he does. His frenetic pacing can’t block some heavy-handed screenwriting from Mark Bianculli that targets big bads like banks, insurance companies and racial and medical inequality as if the rest of us were too stupid to notice. They steal big, give most of it to charity, and measure success in converts, not cash. The pitch? Get America robbing banks and bring the whole rigged system crashing down. Robin Hood with a follow button. Bezos must have laughed hard.
The other bonehead boo-boo is namechecking other better heist movies, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 “Point Break” where the crooks wore dead presidents’ masks. But onward.
Nicholas Hoult is killer as Ryan, a hold-up artist with an influencer’s hustle; his bank-vault break-ins go viral. And why not, since his crew from working-class Pittsburgh wear trendy animal masks. He’s “The Wolf.” You just knew he would get the hippest mask. His “Who’s Hungry” webpage supplies YouTube clips at warp speed. But congrats to Leitch for showing how these clips need to be heavily edited to attract attention.
The Wolf’s team includes his wife Emi (Anna Sawai) and both harbor a not-hard-to-guess secret that isn’t revealed till later. Yawn. Pete Davidson fares better as Vince, a vet who wears a mask as “The Bear” but struggles to raise his young son while the system turns its uncaring back. Jeez. Rhenzy Feliz shows up as Hugo “the Rabbit,” the tech wiz who provides arty drone shots to draw in likes and ward off crowd boredom.
The movie talks anarchy, then turns it into content. It wants to smash the system and still look great in the algorithm.
The bulk of screen time goes to FBI Agent West, played by a seriously overqualified John C. Reilly. It’s West who recruits stoner hacker Reagan (a sparky Zoë Kravitz) to help him monitor the robbers. But while Reilly and Kravitz have a zippy comic byplay going, the light soon dawns that they’re pushing the idea (the film’s real agenda?) that these harmless social influencers might just be dangerous anarchists.
Look, “How to Rob a Bank” goes down easier than you’d expect from a propaganda piece to maintain the status quo. But it’s hell on what should have been the film’s revolutionary spirit. The movie talks anarchy, then turns it into content. It wants to smash the system and still look great in the algorithm. Who says you can’t have it both ways? The box office results in a few days should give us a pretty good idea. Can’t wait.