Fun movie. Love a good Pommie crime caper. Especially one based on fact.

The Bank Job is a caper film, with a twist. A “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of twist. It tells the story of a bank robbery that happened in London in September of 1971. Over a weekend, thieves tunnelled into the vault of a bank in Baker Street and looted all the safety deposit boxes garnering a windfall of over three million pounds. Over half the box holders refused to tell the police what was in their boxes and to this day, not a penny of the take has been recovered. Nobody was ever arrested for the crime. The robbery made headlines for a few days and then disappeared when the government slapped a 'D' Notice on the story, gagging the press from reporting anything more about the story.

The film tells the story of Terry (Jason Stratham), a petty criminal trying to make ends meet selling dodgy cars, who is offered some amazing inside information by an old girlfriend, Martine (Saffron Burrows) about a bank whose alarms will be off for a couple of weeks, leaving it vulnerable. With the help of his mates, they tunnel into the bank’s vault and clean out the contents, which happen to include some very compromising photographs of a certain royal, not to mention a ledger documenting payments to every corrupt cop in London and some other juicy blackmail material likely to embarrass some very important people.

It turns out the bank job was the easy part. It’s staying alive afterward that becomes a problem for Terry and his mates, as the crooked cops, the legit cops, MI5 (who planned the job and used Martine to set it in motion in return for dropping drug charges), the terrorist owner of the compromising photos and the Porn King of London, set about trying to recover their loot.

Roger Donaldson, no stranger to taut spy thrillers (No Way Out, The Recruit), brings us a believable group of ordinary characters caught up in an unbelievable situation that quickly spirals out of their control. Stratham is perfectly cast as the essentially harmless Terry, suddenly confronted with a life and death situation he has no experience in dealing with. Keeley Hawes is excellent as his very put upon wife, as is the rest of the supporting cast, particularly Richard Linton as the MI5 spook pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Given how much of this story is shrouded in secrecy, it’s hard to know how much is fact and how much is fancy, but at the very least, it’s a galloping good yarn with a satisfying ending (except for a couple of minor characters) that leaves you wondering about who was really in those photos…