(2008) A very enjoyable, exciting, but ultimately depressing - Whom can one trust? - movie. Loosely based on actual events (most of the names have been changed to protect the guilty) - from director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais - of the biggest bank heist in London at the time, more than three million quid, this has lots of twists and turns in a plot loaded with unexpectdeness. (On the DVD an accompanying bonus feature details the actual robbery.)

Somewhere in the Caribbean in 1970 a royal personage of the British crown was unaware of having been caught in a compromising situation on camera. In 1971 while in custody, a black radical and slumlord, Michael Abdul Malik, aka Michael X (Peter De Jersey) - alleged to be involved in kidnapping, extortion, drug dealing, prostitution, and assault - gets a free pass from England back to Trinidad by blackmailing the British government with photos of the earlier incident. Before his departure, he has placed the pictures of the princess (on the recommendation of his accomplice Lew Vogel) in safe-deposit box #118 in the vault of Lloyds Bank on the corner of Baker and Marlyebone streets in the West End; accompanying him home is Gale Benson, a spy with the mission to see if any additional copies of the photos are in his possession.

The British secret service MI-5 (or is it MI-6?), having learned of the location of the photos, but needing to remain invisible and unaccountable in retrieving them, resorts to inducing a gang of petty thieves into doing their dirty work. Using a woman, Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), arrested for possession of drugs at Heathrow Airport, agent Tim Everett (Richard Lintern) makes her an offer of dropping all charges if she will assemble a professional team of villains to break into the bank; additionally she and the robbers will be permitted to keep all the loot (mostly cash and jewels) from the safe-deposit boxes in exchange for the contents of one box.

At the Denmark Club with its semi-nude dancers and waitresses, small-time crooks from East London, Terry Leather (Jason Statham), owner of a car dealership with a heavy debt owed to Mr Jessell (whose thugs Pinky and Perky keep pestering Terry for the money), and his mates Kevin Swain (Stephen Campbell Moore), who'd had a brief affair with Martine (who tells them that she's learned through an acquaintance that Lloyds will be without a security system for one week while a new one is being installed), and Dave Shilling (Daniel Mays), an actor in porn flicks, take the bait from their female friend for the big score.

Recruiting three more participants - Major Guy Arthur Singer (James Faulkner), a tailor with an upper-class accent, Bambas, skilled in using a thermic lance for burning through reinforced concrete, and newly-wed Eddie Burton (Michael Jibson), as roof lookout - they lease Le Sac, a shop near the bank, from which they tunnel to beneath the bank's basement vault. Unbeknownst to Terry and his gang, the walkie-talkie conversations with Eddie on the roof accidentally get monitored by an amateur ham-radio operator, Mr Addey, who contacts the police (though the first four stations dismissed his claim as a hoax). With numerous banks within the ten-mile radius of the radio reception, the cops begin a frantic search to find the malefactors.

Further, and far more dangerous to them, one of the safe-deposit boxes belongs to Lew Vogel (David Suchet), a real villain with vicious methods, in which he has stashed his ledger containing all of the names and payments of police officers patronizing his Denmark Club and its prostitutes. Also Sonia Berns's box hides photographs taken in her brothel of various MPs, such as Lord Drysdale, and other government officials.

The secret service worries that the cops might catch the thieves first, spoiling their entire plan of keeping the princess's photos out of the public eye; the corrupt officials are desperate to protect their identities from being associated with lewd conduct; Vogel is willing to use extreme measures of torture and murder to recover his ledger. Caught in between all of these competing interests, Terry and his boys have to think and act fast to play one off the other if possible. Given the circumstances of official malfeasance and the ruthless malevolence of gangsters, Terry begins to look almost heroic battling overwhelming odds. (But if you'd lost everything in your safe-deposit box, you probably wouldn't see him as anything more than a common criminal.)

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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