How does one of the largest companies in the world make an anti-capitalist heist movie? Not particularly well. That’s an inherent flaw of the set-up for Amazon MGM Studios’ How to Rob a Bank. The ethos of the film is that megacorporations like banks, insurance companies, and retail stores do not care about the little guy. The minimum wage employee is overworked, underpaid, and replaceable in the blink of an eye. But there’s a small flaw when this message is being relayed to the viewer by way of a seven-hundred-billion-dollar company. It lacks the teeth to really dig into the growing anger of the American people.
How to Rob a Bank opens with a ground-level shot of one of Pittsburgh’s Three Sisters bridges. Someone drops off a duffle bag before ducking back into a van that displays the city’s crest on its side. It quickly becomes evident that this person, Emi (Anna Sawai), is not an employee of the city, but a member of the bank-robbing crew going viral on social media. Led by Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), who wears a wolf mask, the group has amassed an online following. They film their bank robberies and give the viewer tips on how to pull off a heist just like theirs in whatever city they’re watching the video in. Agent John West (John C. Reilly) from the FBI is watching their every move like a hawk, but needs to call in a hacker, Reagan (Zoë Kravitz), to put an end to this madness.
Amazon MGM Studios
The gang of robbers in How to Rob a Bank is hard to hate. They’re stealing millions from FDIC-insured banks and they’re giving the money to charities. They’re funding social projects and caring for their community more than the government, which is supposed to be doing that same work. In most heist movies, the viewer is rooting for the thieves. It’s way more fun to watch them outsmart the cops and, especially in this case, there’s a Robin Hood element that tips the scales in their favor. Unfortunately, How to Rob a Bank is afraid to fully side with the gang. The robbers believe that the system has to be disrupted, because as it stands now, the rich are getting richer at the calculated and purposeful expense of the poor. Ryan isn’t calling for complete and total anarchy, but for disruption and protest. When he finally explains why the last bank they hit is the most personal, it does feel worthy of widespread anger and whistleblowing.
Reagan has caught the attention of the FBI because of the project that got her fired from Carnegie Mellon University. She describes an app she created that essentially uses social media to create a surveillance state. You can select parts of an image or a video, have the program cross-reference it with everything uploaded onto social media, then triangulate a location. Reagan has opened Pandora’s Box by allowing law enforcement to watch and target civilians on a horrifying scale. This creation allows the FBI to catch up to the gang of bandits. It’s one thing to have a cops vs. robbers chase where one is using their ingenuity to outsmart the other, but it’s another thing entirely to have the crux of a film hinge on a cutesy panopticon that uses hearts as its icon for locations.
Amazon MGM Studios
Even if one were to remove the inherent problems baked into the script in terms of the good, bad, and gray people in between, How to Rob a Bank doesn’t capitalize on having a banter-heavy dialogue. The script pairs Kravitz and Reilly as an Odd Couple-like duo, but most of their back-and-forth is about Kravitz’s Reagan wanting to stop for food. Maybe that’s an homage to Brad Pitt’s eternal eating in the Ocean’s movies, but it simply doesn’t work here. The same goes for the gang of thieves. Ryan and Emi are married, yet they have devastatingly little chemistry between them. The other members of the group, Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) and Vince (Pete Davidson), get only small moments to show their home lives, but the real issue is that the audience doesn’t have a sense of the team as a unit. When they’re not actively involved in a heist, there are fewer than a handful of scenes that reveal their dynamic. In a heist movie, two things are essential: the caper and the crew. How to Rob a Bank doesn’t make good on either one.
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