Heists and Homelife
‘The Bank Job’ is solid entertainment, while ‘Married Life’ and ‘CJ7’ run out of laughs
By Andy Klein
The Bank Job, a new heist film from Australian-born New Zealand director Roger Donaldson is sorta kinda maybe based on a true story: One weekend in 1971, a gang dug a tunnel from a nearby store and broke into the vault of a Lloyds Bank branch on Baker Street in London. They looted safe deposit boxes and made off with (conservatively) half a million pounds.
Two aspects made this particular robbery notable. First, a ham radio operator stumbled across the walkie-talkie transmissions between the thieves in the vault and their lookout across the street. He alerted the police, who, after some initial skepticism, checked out 700 banks within several miles and found no obvious signs of a break-in. Secondly – and more intriguing – after three days of major news coverage, the story suddenly disappeared altogether, suppressed by an order from the government.
The latter development inevitably provoked speculation. Such orders usually involve national security. Why would a plain-vanilla bank robbery justify a government-mandated press blackout?
Screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe, Flushed Away, Bullshot Crummond) have spun an engaging fantasy around the few known facts. In their version, Terry (Jason Statham), occasional crook and owner of a garage, is seduced into planning the job through the efforts of former homey Martine (Saffron Burrows), who has escaped the old neighborhood and become a jet-setting model. When Martine refuses to elaborate on the source of her information, Terry is wary, but proceeds anyway.
What he doesn’t know is that Martine is being manipulated by Tim (Richard Lintern), a British intelligence operative. MI5 is clandestinely instigating the robbery in order to obtain the contents of a safe deposit box. Michael X (Peter de Jersey) – a crime boss and slumlord who claims to be a black militant – has managed to avoid prosecution, because he has an envelope of photos of Princess Margaret boffing a secret lover. Martine is supposed to retrieve the envelope without looking inside; the authorities don’t really care about whatever else is in the vault.
Still, there is one factor that neither Terry’s gang nor MI5 have thought of, even though it’s perfectly logical as soon as you think of it. As a result, the aftermath of the job becomes much more complicated and much uglier than anyone envisioned.
Donaldson has done a wide range of material – from the family drama of 1981’s Smash Palace, which kick-started the New Zealand film industry, to adventure (The Bounty), political drama (Marie), thriller (No Way Out), comedy (Cadillac Man), sci-fi/horror (Species), and whatever the hell Cocktail is. The Bank Job is his first heist film … if you’re generous enough to pretend that his ill-advised 1994 remake of The Getaway never happened.
It’s the suspense elements that seem to bring out the best in him, and The Bank Job, despite a fair amount of humor, is pretty much a straight-out thriller. He achieves just the right blend here of plot mechanics – how’d they do it, why did it go wrong, how can they extricate themselves – and character development, with each member of Terry’s gang quickly and deftly delineated.
With Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and The Italian Job, Statham started out as the go-to supporting player for British heist films. He’s since become a star in over-the-top action films like War, Crank, and the Transporter series, so now he returns to the heist genre as the lead, with a character fully developed enough to let him stretch a little. Burrows does good work, as do Stephen Campbell Moore and Daniel Mays as Terry’s mates. There may not be much to take home from The Bank Job, but it’s a solid evening’s entertainment, which is not so common these days.
Crime rears its all-too-common head in strikingly different form in Married Life, which sits halfway between comedy and period film noir. At first, it’s a story of simple marital infidelity. Harry (Chris Cooper) is a successful businessman, ca. 1949. His nearly three-decade marriage to Pat (Patricia Clarkson) seems idyllic. But Harry has met the much younger Kay (Rachel McAdams), who gives him something Pat doesn’t … but not what you’d probably expect.
Kay believes in romantic love, where Pat equates love with sex. Period. It’s not Kay’s firm, young flesh that rejuvenates Harry; it’s her attitude.
Harry has every intention of marrying Kay. But he knows Pat would fall apart without him, and – being the Nicest Guy in the World – he can’t bear the idea of causing her pain. So – being the Nicest Guy in the World – he decides he must kill her … swiftly, painlessly, happily. Spare her all that misery.
Of course, we immediately perceive that Harry is also, in his way, the Dopiest Guy in the World. He’s frightfully starry-eyed and naive; it never occurs to him that someone with Pat’s worldview could probably pick up the pieces and soldier on without breaking a sweat.
He’s also naive enough to introduce Kay to his best friend, handsome, irresponsible rake Richard (Pierce Brosnan), who immediately starts to make moves on her. (Richard also narrates the story, even though most of it transpires from Harry’s POV.)
Together with Oren Moverman (who cowrote I’m Not There), director Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue) has adapted John Bingham’s obscure 50-year-old novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven. He has assembled a wonderful cast and has the benefit of terrific cinematography from Peter Deming (Lost Highway), who recreates the color equivalent of some of the look of late-’40s thrillers without seeming precious.
But there is something off with the pacing. The big Hitchcockian suspense sequence toward the end feels like something from the middle of a movie; you expect one more twist, but none develops.
Likewise, the tone never comes together. It’s great to straddle the serious and the comic, but there’s also the danger of ending up with neither … which is what happens here.
A confused tone also prevails in Stephen Chow’s CJ7, which unapologetically recycles E.T. and Chaplin’s The Kid. Chow wrote and directed but only plays a secondary role, as a dirt-poor construction worker, who labors beyond the point of exhaustion in order keep eight-year-old son Dicky (Xu Jiao) in a fancy private school. The two live in a ramshackle structure that appears to be in the middle of a dump. When one of Dicky’s rich classmates shows off his expensive new toy, the CJ1, Dad finds an even better “toy” in the junkyard – an alien doll/pet that is essentially a lovable puppy with superpowers.
I love Chow’s work, from his Royal Tramp and Forbidden City Cop days up to the more recent Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. So it pains me to say that I found CJ7 downright disturbing. Chow tries to milk laughs from sheer sadism here. Dad slaps Dicky around when he disappoints, and Dicky gives the adorable CJ7 the same treatment. By the time the school bullies started threatening CJ7 with power tools, I had lost the ability to laugh at all.
The Bank Job. Directed by Roger Donaldson. Written by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais. With Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays, and David Suchet. Opens Friday citywide.
Married Life. Directed by Ira Sachs. Screenplay by Ira Sachs and Oren Moverman; based on the novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham. With Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, and Rachel McAdams. Opens Friday at the Landmark West Los Angeles, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pacific’s ArcLight, Laemmle’s Monica 4, and Pacific’s ArcLight Sherman Oaks.
CJ7. Directed by Stephen Chow Sing-Chi. Written by Stephen Chow, Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai-King. Fung Chih Chiang, and Lam Fung. With Xu Jiao, Stephen Chow, and Kitty Zhang. Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Laemmle’s Monica 4, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.
Published: 03/05/2008
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