A tragedy that tries hard to pass itself off as a comedy, “How to Rob a Bank” is a fitfully diverting mess. It tracks a group of Pittsburgh have-nots who, with flash and social media skills, have turned their bank-robbing into a wildly successful influencer hustle. Like that notorious Brooklyn son, Willie Sutton — whose decades of bank robbing in the first half of the 20th century made him a celebrity — this Pittsburgh crew brings audience-pleasing finesse to its larcenous ways. Like Sutton, the robbers also wear creative disguises on the job, keep their guns unloaded (mostly) and inspire dubious comparisons to Robin Hood.
The gang’s brand, as it were, is a social media presence that it has built — along with a fast-growing viewership — by posting videos about its criminal endeavors on assorted platforms. As the movie’s waggish title suggests, some of the videos are instructional while others are brazenly celebratory. The crew’s mouthpiece and apparent brains, Ryan (Nicholas Hoult, doing a lot of heavy lifting), serves as its on-camera avatar. Publicly known as the Wolf, he only appears online in the lupine mask that he wears when he’s divesting banks of their cash, the same disguise that’s the crew’s trademark. Unlike the big bad wolf that has long bared its teeth in fairy tales and elsewhere, this one promises deliverance and more.
Much of the movie is a cat-and-mouse chase between the gang and a small F.B.I. unit led by the exasperated John West (John C. Reilly). Reilly tends to class up any joint that he’s in, but he never fits into this button-down role. Given the strained giddiness, you keep expecting laughs from him, for one. It’s a hope that grows exponentially dimmer once his character brings in a software engineer, Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz), to help hunt Wolf and his gang. West finds Gardner taking bong hits in her loft, a messy lair that invites unfortunate comparisons to the equally sprawling space that a different Kravitz character — another shut-in with estimable computer skills — inhabited in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller “KIMI” (2022).
Written by Mark Bianculli and directed by David Leitch, “How to Rob a Bank” works best when it doesn’t try too hard and lets its cast romp. Pete Davidson plays Vince, a military veteran, and Rhenzy Feliz is Hugo, who edits the gang’s videos, giving them snap. Like Ryan and his gal, Emi (Anna Sawai, in a stereotypical helpmate role), Vince and Hugo have difficult back stories that eventually shed faint light on their crimes. The filmmakers handle these histories with divergent approaches and to different effect. Sometimes, they let the visuals do the explaining — as when the gliding camera follows Hugo from one rundown building to the next — but they also splash tears on this movie that it never rightly earns.
The bank robbers’ videos are lightly amusing, but their visual pop, nasty charm and narrative coherence only underscore the rest of the movie’s shortcomings. Leitch is best known for action movies like “Deadpool 2,” and he’s most comfortable here when the gang is larking about, running and gunning, flipping bodies and squealing wheels, which they don’t do enough. As the movie shifts into a more somber register, though, the energy starts leaking from it like a deflating tire. The scenes between West and Gardner are especially unfortunate. They’re unnecessary and routinely bring the whole thing to a near-standstill.
That’s too bad because even though the movie begins flatlining in its second half, that’s also when it gets more interesting. From the start, the filmmakers tip that there’s more to these crimes than good old-fashioned greed; there are principles and even politics involved, or at least some waving in that direction. The robbers have loftier ambitions for themselves, their families and the country, motivations that produce some fiery rhetoric and riotous scenes of resistance that summon up both delirious fantasies of antifa and the specter of the real Luigi Mangione, who admitted that he shot and killed a UnitedHealthcare executive in 2024. None of it finally makes sense, including that this movie is from a company founded by Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. I’d love to read his review.
How to Rob a Bank Rated R for gun violence and bloodshed. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters.
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