The Bank Job

Forget the blandly generic title and the casting of B-action star Jason Statham, a stalwart tough guy with stocky presence and limited range. This British production film, inspired by the real-life 1971 "walkie-talkie robbery" in which thieves made off with the contents of hundreds of safety deposit boxes, is a terrific piece of heist filmmaking made with a rough-and-tumble attitude and old-school professionalism. Statham plays a family man with a dodgy past who puts together a colorful crew of small-timers on a moment's notice for the job of a lifetime, or so promises an old flame (Saffron Burrows) with her own agenda. They soon realize that some serious heavyweights had stashed compromising things in those boxes and will do whatever it takes to get them back. Roger Donaldson juggles a complicated story with oodles of peripheral characters and tangled story lines (involving everyone from gangland bosses to government agents to the royal family) without dropping a subplot, and he drives the action and the tension with muscular storytelling chops. Best of all, he returns the genre to the physicality of logistics and practical mechanics in an era before cell phones and computer hacks. The sprawling messiness only adds to the dynamism. Stephen Campbell Moore co-stars as Statham's right-hand man, and watch for David Suchet in a small role as a mob boss.

The single-disc edition features both wide-screen and full-screen editions of the film. The "2-Disc Special Edition" (on DVD and Blu-ray) features the wide-screen edition, a standard-definition digital copy of the film (which can be downloaded to PC, iPod or other compatible players) and bonus supplements. Actress Burrows and composer J. Peter Robinson join director Donaldson on the commentary track, a better-than-average discussion of the details of the film, anchored by Donaldson's no-nonsense production talk. Also features six minutes of deleted and extended scenes (with optional commentary by Donaldson and friends) and the featurettes "Inside The Bank Job" and "The Baker Street Bank Raid," the latter about the real-life crime that captured the public's imagination before it disappeared from the news thanks to a gag order from the government. To this day it remains an enigma.