STOMACH-CHURNING

This Eat the Rich Heist Film Will Make You Sick

“How to Rob a Bank” is a Robin Hood tale for the TikTok generation.

Eat the rich fantasies don’t come more unappetizing than How to Rob a Bank (Nov. 13, in theaters), an antifa-themed screed of a heist thriller whose simplistic inanity is only outdone by its abject corniness.

Matching the extremeness of any conservative-oriented contemporary entertainment (such as Prime Video’s rah-rah hit The Terminal List), David Leitch’s latest is as obnoxious as his prior The Fall Guy was charming. And the fact that it prioritizes its left-wing ideology over genre demands renders it borderline interminable. It’s a film for fans of Luigi Mangione, teens who get their politics from TikTok, and moviegoers who didn’t realize that Fight Club was a satire in which burn-it-down anarchy led not to happily-ever-after cultural revolution but apocalyptic fascism.

“It’s capitalism!” screams an evil banker to justify his predatory loans at the conclusion of How to Rob a Bank, thereby summing up the economic critique of Leitch and writer Mark Bianculli’s cinematic harangue. Their film attempts to rage against the machine from within the (Amazon/MGM) machine.

Yet even setting aside the hilarious hypocrisy of a wannabe blockbuster censuring the system that made its existence possible, what they concoct is a wholly tedious tirade that, instead of investigating the issues it raises, merely preaches to an uninformed choir with a mixture of self-satisfied vehemence, corner-cutting storytelling, and outright illogicality.

Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), a modern-day Robin Hood, has garnered 900 million views—a figure that’s repeated multiple times to hammer home its awesomeness—via a viral video series titled “How to Rob a Bank.” In it, he wears a wolf mask and depicts his crew’s real-world thievery while giving tutorials on how to get away with stealing and proffering noble rationalizations for taking from the rich.

His allies, he contends, are the working class, and the enemy is a United States that’s wracked with inequality and rigged in favor of the one percent. However, to prove how America keeps its citizens down, he states that only one out of 100 people will become millionaires—a fact that so staggeringly contradicts his thesis that it immediately marks him as a fight-the-power dolt.

As imagined by Bianculli’s leaden script, Ryan isn’t a character; he’s just a bleach-blonde mouthpiece for Twitter-grade SJW opinions. Even once his mission’s motivation is revealed, he comes across as a stick figure designed to sermonize. His gang, alas, is no more developed. His girlfriend (Shogun’s Anna Sawai) is a loyal, loving blank; his military-veteran accomplice (Pete Davidson) is a wronged soldier who sings his baby to sleep at night; and his hacker (Rhenzy Feliz) is a cipher with an abuela who wants him to find a nice girl. Together, they might be the most featureless multicultural crew in crime fiction history, and How to Rob Your Bank envisions them in schematically lionizing terms.

Not helping matters, Ryan’s videos are smug, grating affairs constructed with ugly graphics, snarky narration, and tiresome flash. Then again, there’s nothing that doesn’t elicit groans in How to Rob a Bank, including FBI agent West (John C. Reilly), whose failure to nab the thieves drives him to enlist the assistance of Reagan (Zoë Kravitz), a Pittsburgh computer whiz who’s under house arrest for creating an app that can locate people by comparing objects in images.

West struggles to use AirPlay and drives a 1991 wood-paneled Wagoneer. Yet despite being old-school and determined to take down Ryan and company, he’s remarkably sympathetic to their anger—another example of the film clunkily weighting everything toward its POV, as well as a telegraphed sign that he’ll ultimately wonder if maybe he’s wrong about who the “good guys” and “bad guys” really are.

With a nose ring, scattered arm tattoos, disheveled hair, and a laptop decorated with Black Lives Matter and “Racism is Small Dick Energy” stickers, Reagan is cast as an even more understanding agent of the law, thus exacerbating How to Rob a Bank’s one-noteness. Everyone is basically on the same page in Leitch’s film, so West and Reagan’s back-and-forth about the virtues of Ryan’s undertaking rings insincere.

Worse, Leitch—famed for staging extravagant stunts and action in John Wick and Atomic Blonde—prioritizes blabbing over grand showstoppers. From a formal standpoint, it’s the least exciting and inventive entry in the director’s canon.

How to Rob a Bank’s sloppiness escalates as it enters its back half, whether Ryan gains additional cohorts who are never identified, other comrades pull off amazing feats with supernatural ease, or Davidson’s crook commits the most laughably preposterous and schmaltzy act imaginable. Regardless of its in-your-face commotion, it’s a long, slow crawl to a conclusion in which protestors take to the streets, throwing Molotov cocktails and waving American flags in defiance of a nation that refuses to hear them—a vision of rebellion that’s far more palatable than the recent real-life ones coming out of Paris and Milan.

There’s a distinct cosplaying aspect to Leitch and Bianculli’s portrait of domestic insurgence, as well as a childishness—which, in the final tally, makes Ryan’s use of social media to spread his message intensely apt.

Because Ryan, West, Reagan and the rest of How to Rob a Bank’s zeroes are plot devices pretending to be actual human beings, engaging with their ideas or plights is comically impossible. Worse than their emptiness or the film’s crude conception of 21^st-century class struggle, however, is the lack of spectacular set pieces. Leitch doesn’t care about the nuts and bolts of his bank robberies—which makes them helter-skelter afterthoughts—and his shootouts and car chases are pedestrian.

Whereas the material craves an ingenious slam-bang sequence (or two) to cut the ponderousness of its lecturing, it opts instead to restate its thesis, each time with more haughtiness.

Given that it refrains from having its heroes commit actual murder, How to Rob a Bank is a lot like a Che Guevara T-shirt—a celebration of “resistance” that actively eschews the very violence and complexity that defines it. The TikTok generation will likely find it profound; the rest will simply shake their heads in disbelief and boredom.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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