When we say there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism it’s supposed to be a tragedy, not a business model.
It’s bad enough that Amazon makes it nearly impossible to avoid using its services after actively driving most of its competition out of business, which in turn damages the job market and makes it harder to earn enough money to buy things in the first place. So sometimes folks have to buy necessities from Amazon because, thanks to Amazon, there are few, if any options.
It’s enough to make you want to start a revolution, but “How to Rob a Bank” is not the way to do it. It’s an Amazon-MGM production, which makes the film’s efforts to sell anti-capitalism as entertainment hypocritical, laughable and insulting. It’s a film that says you should stand up to Jeff Bezos, but only after you pay Jeff Bezos. No matter how cool “Atomic Blonde” director David Leitch tries to make bank robbing look, this is the opposite of cool.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Ryan, a bank robber and social media influencer who posts videos about how to successfully rob banks. He says you are more likely to get away with armed robbery than you are to buy a starter home in today’s economy, which certainly sounds true. Ryan’s crew includes his wife Emi (Anna Sawai), struggling parent Vince (Pete Davidson), and tech guy Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz). They steal lots of money but they give most of it to charity. They don’t care about making a profit. They care about inspiring everyone in America to rob banks, and by extension, to break down the whole broken system.
John C. Reilly plays FBI Agent John West, the cop to these robbers, who enlists a hacker named Reagan (Zoe Kravitz) to help catch these high tech criminals. Although “How to Rob a Bank” takes place in a universe where police corruption exists, even the antisocial rebels refuse to say all cops are bad. Agent West exists for one reason only, and that’s to prove that cops are good, actually. He spends the whole film telling Reagan that cops aren’t all in service of the rich and powerful, and aren’t wielded as a cudgel against poor people and minorities. According to this so-called revolutionary film, cops actually protect the fragile social fabric of America from chaos, but only if the chaos is caused by poor people. What’s worse, it’s an argument Leitch’s film never challenges in any meaningful way.
In the film’s most incredible, gag-inducing scene, Agent West tells this young hacker that crime isn’t cool. When he was younger, a riot broke out in Chicago and his relative’s store burned down. The insurance company refused to pay out, so the man died penniless and miserable. That, Agent West says, is why the rioters were the real bad guys. Instead of asking why he doesn’t blame the insurance company for screwing his family over, or asking why people were rioting in the first place — since many of the Chicago riots in the mid-to-late 20th century were a response to racist housing policies and police violence — the hacker just sits there, taking in all this “wisdom,” like a good little sponge.
“How to Rob a Bank” is a frickin’ narc. It talks a big game about anti-establishment ideology but it’s in the pocket of a major corporation. David Leitch may adopt the visual style of TikToks and video games, but he’s just putting on airs, sitting backwards in a chair to prove he’s hip, which any kid will tell you is sadder than sitting in a chair like a normal adult.
There’s real revolutionary art in the world. You can watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary “The Battle of Algiers” at any time, even on Amazon Prime. But Amazon-MGM would much rather you watch this hacky, uninspiring version instead. Even the title of “How to Rob a Bank” seems to have been lifted from “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a film which claims eco-terrorism is a moral and ethical necessity, without making any concessions to the contrary. You can disagree with that film’s politics all you want but it has actual principles and it commits to them, instead of turning anti-capitalism into escapism while hand-feeding you reasons to say “not all cops.”
One has to wonder, while watching this sad excuse for a heist film, if there’s any ethical way to make studio movies in this era of Amazon-MGM and Skydance. You certainly can’t make a film that claims to have principles if you have to sell out your principles just to get it made. I wrote in the past about how the James Bond franchise is now owned by a James Bond villain, and “How to Rob a Bank” is the kind of genre film that emerges from that kind of internal conflict. The corporation knows people are furious at the 1%, and its response was to exploit that fury for to make the 1% richer.
“How to Rob a Bank” is an ordinary genre exercise play-acting as meaningful cinema. Even if it were entertaining enough to get by as a superficial pleasure — and it’s not, because Leitch’s action sequences are unusually underwhelming — it refuses to admit it’s escapism. Instead, we have to watch Nicholas Hoult make speeches about how important it is to rebel against the system that’s destroying us.
“How to Rob a Bank” opens exclusively in theaters on Nov. 13.
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