Bank Job: A Brilliant Blunder!

When the Brits make a film, they really make a film! Take Four Weddings and A Funeral with Hugh Grant, made on a shoe string but grossing millions at the box office. Then there was Nottinghill again with Hugh and his love interest Julia Roberts and the Full Monty starring Robert Carlyle. But now there’s an English nugget that shouldn’t be missed, Bank Job. If the Americans, and more precisely New Yorkers think they have a scandal unraveling before their very eyes in the misappropriate behaviour of ex Governor Eliot Spitzer, then take a look at what the British Royal Family, namely Princess Margaret, (Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister) and Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s favourite uncle, got up to in the early 1970’s.

Add to the mix a group of amateur bank robbers who would make Del Boy (David Jason) and Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst) of Only Fools and Horse fame look professional, the sultry Mata Hari figure Martine, played by Saffron Burrows, and a government headed by Edward Heath, all of whom seem to be into the seedy sexy underworld that was on offer in London in that decade, and you have the mix for a perfect movie.

The would be robbers come across as more lucky than cunning, as they are conned into the ’job’ which is the UK’s biggest bank heist and is actually a ’cover up’ in the making by the government. The police are portrayed as complete incompetence, Government ministers are all perverts and the movie in general moves so fast as the story unfolds somewhat like a three dimensional chess game, with the all pieces moving among the different levels.

Known as the walkie talkie robbery the ‘job’ is to cleanout the vault at Lloyds Bank on Baker Street, London. With the band of merry men squawking on their walkie talkies the story became headline news only to be hushed up by top officials in MI5 and MI6 as the true reason behind the robbery is revealed.