2/12 ForReel Score | 1.5/5 Stars

Someone’s got to hand it to Alejandro González Iñárritu: the guy was ahead of the curve. His latest satire (which I personally found grating to endure), Digger, wrestled with art’s necessity—and pointlessness—as the world collapses around us. Taking direct shots at Adam McKay’s Don't Look Up while pre-emptively kicking Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning in the teeth, Digger accentuated the weightlessness of political art when one-percenters make it. Such toothless exercises in radicality (one recalls how Edgar Wright’s The Running Man [produced under the Ellison family’s Paramount banner] pump-faked the novel’s pre-9/11 ending) have no place in our modern society, with David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank (produced by Amazon MGM) serving as Hollywood’s latest “eat-the-rich” infraction.

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, and Pete Davidson as Robin Hood-esque live-streamers who rob banks to spark an economic revolution, How to Rob a Bank reads like if 30 Rock’s “how do you do, fellow kids?” bit became a heist thriller. Near-endless in its didactic plotting, How to Rob a Bank’s TikTok-level quality ironically backfires both textually and visually. Apart from being Leitch’s ugliest work since Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, it also lacks the tightly choreographed action that made his previous films so enjoyable, stripping Leitch of his better quirks as a stuntman-turned filmmaker. Gone are Bullet Train’s violent excesses and The Fall Guy’s irresistible charm; there’s much more yapping than either punching or shooting.

Opposite the robbers is an entertaining combo of Zoë Kravitz as a hacker and John C. Reilly as a near-retirement FBI detective (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), who achieve a decent rapport despite How to Rob a Bank’s weak genre trappings. Their mid-movie conversation about Point Break being the best heist movie—while arguably true—was a stark reminder of How to Rob a Bank’s lazy derivativeness. Maybe the Magnolia fan in me liked seeing Reilly as a cop again, but the whole “one last case” screams Jeff Bridges in David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. Kravitz is fun, even though her character is primarily a plot device to justify—yet seldom interrogate—the FBI's use of illegal surveillance technology.

That lack of interrogation is part of what makes How to Rob a Bank a misfire, lecturing when it should be examining. I don’t need a $60 million movie to tell me that the class divide sucks, and I especially don’t need one that won’t play hardball. One Battle After Another interrogated the means of revolution whilst delivering as a propulsive actioner, but David Leitch isn’t as smart a filmmaker as Paul Thomas Anderson. Leitch’s powers are in combat choreography—not throwing the first brick. Such current imagery demands a filmmaker in tune with online aesthetics (I long to see what Eugene Kotlyarenko's version of this movie would look like), not somebody who still thinks Big Chungus is funny.

Currency—monetarily or temporally—is key, and there’s undeniable merit to How to Rob a Bank’s collision of financial and attention economies. The concept of live-streaming bank robbers is interesting enough on paper, but Leitch wastes that potential on an exorbitant amount of exhausting navel-gazing. That’s not to say I don’t like dialogue-heavy movies (Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love blows How to Rob a Bank out of the water without having a single shootout), except this movie disappointingly departs from Leitch’s homegrown stunt-heavy wheelhouse. Leitch directing an actionless action film plays like a fish-out-of-water game, leaving me puzzled about what one can extrapolate from lazy toothlessness. Art is meant to challenge—not lecture—especially when Leitch’s diatribes have the depth of a YouTube video essay.

And that’s not even to mention how tiringly structureless How to Rob a Bank is. A heist film with a checklist of robberies should have a rigid roadmap, perfected by Heat’s meticulously epic framework. We’ve played these games before in dozens of genre classics, and they’ve been done better tenfold. The A-list ensemble undeniably elevates the material, but not even a beautiful, beach-blond Nicholas Hoult (who, for a talented actor I deeply admire, will not be the next James Bond anytime soon) can compensate for How to Rob a Bank’s weak redundancies. This is a dialogue-heavy movie with deafeningly little to say, dignifying its disposability in our current political ecosystem. If you’re not going the distance, why even bother?

If Digger taught us anything, it’s that cutesy, condescending, hypocritical resistance-kitsch is tacky in a contemporary landscape where everything has gone cattywampus. How to Rob a Bank isn’t exactly the epitome of this dreck (The Social Reckoning was absolutely agonizing to sit through), but it’s definitely a stone-cold example of soft Hollywood liberalism. This is a movie for the eleven Democrats who, after curbstomping MAGA, failed to impeach Pete Hegseth on Tuesday. How to Rob a Bank isn’t an “evil movie” on the register of Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy (also an Amazon MGM production), but its intentions are so feckless that it effectively serves no purpose. If there’s a crowd to be pleased here, its only occupant is Jeff Bezos.

Movie Review: "How to Rob a Bank" Succeeds in Stealing Your Time