Truth, it has been said, is stranger than fiction. The Bank Job, inspired by the infamous 1971 robbery of Lloyds Bank in London, is built on just that paradox. You just can’t make this sort of stuff up. Generally riveting, this taut film thrives within the unlikeliest of intersections — high-level corruption, sexual scandal, racial tension and murder in 1970’s England.

Terry (Jason Statham) is a car dealer with a dodgy past who is trying to set his life straight for the sake of his new family. But when Martine (Saffron Burrows), a beautiful model from the old neighborhood lets him in on a foolproof scheme to knock over a bank’s safety deposit vault, Terry recognizes the opportunity of a lifetime. The hit is an evolutionary leap forward from Terry’s usual “skullduggery” to the “the big score that will make sense of everything.”

Little does Terry know that he and his crew are pawns in an elaborate conspiracy reaching to the highest echelons of the British government. Blackmailed by a militant civil rights leader with compromising photographs of a member of the royal family, the government is desperate to recover the photos from the safety deposit box in which they are stored, but cannot, in any way, be linked to the crime. That’s where Terry comes in. He gets to keep the loot and the government gets the incriminating pictures, and no one, not even Terry, is the wiser. At least that was how it was supposed to go down.

What Terry and his crew don’t realize is that the boxes containing millions in cash and jewelry also hold the dirty little secrets of some of London’s most powerful criminals. Hunted by both the police and London’s criminal underworld, Terry and his team suddenly find themselves in way over their heads.

Jason Statham is the Teflon actor. Despite participating in some genuinely dreadful films (Transporter II, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale), Statham always seems to come out on the other side smelling like roses. There is a rough yet warm quality about his persona, and a brutish physicality that makes him the perfect, graceful heavy. The Bank Job is not the sort of film where he gets to show off these talents but it does allow him to stretch his resume to include something other than movies about bullets and body counts.

The Bank Job is also a step in the right direction for director Roger Donaldson known primarily as a capable yet uninspired helmer of such films as Species and The Recruit. Here, he employs rough-around-the-edges, indie sensibilities that belay his slick, Hollywood connections. He stocks his film with a terrific cast of Brits, not the sort we are used to seeing pop up in Potter films, but the sort you know you have seen here and there but just can’t seem to place. Fleshed out and funny, they spout gritty, street-colored, wrong-side-of-the-tracks London colloquialisms, going beyond the bizarre fashions and bad hair to create an authentic time and place.

If you want a heist film the likes of the Ocean movies, The Bank Job isn’t it. Sure it has the usual double, triple and quadruple-crosses as well as the inability at any given moment to tell who has the upper hand. But The Bank Job is the sort of film where the slightest, most inconsequential bungles return with deadly, merciless precision. When things go wrong, they go bloodily wrong.

There are few things better than a flawlessly executed heist thriller, and while The Bank Job is not that film, it certainly comes close.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.