Roger Donaldson | 107 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | UK, USA & Australia / English | 15 / R
Inspired by real events (more on that later), The Bank Job sees the British Secret Service covertly enlist a gang of crooks to rob a bank’s vault in order to retrieve some compromising photos of a member of the royal family — not that the robbers know this is what they’re up to. Unfortunately for them, the vault also contains property belonging to an organised crime boss, who isn’t too happy it’s been pilfered.
Inspired by a real 1971 robbery, plus a host of other issues that were in the news around that time, The Bank Job is a rich stew of fact, supposition, and wild imagination. Apparently the filmmakers claimed it was very much based on a true story, including new information from an inside source, though eventually admitted some of it (including a major character) was wholly fiction. One fact boldly stated on screen — that black activist Michael X’s files are sealed until 2054 — sounds entirely plausible, but is completely false.
Accurate or not, it’s a heckuva tale. Unfortunately, its telling leaves something to be desired. Screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are names most familiar from their TV sitcoms (The Likely Lads, Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet), but also have an array of surprising credits to their name (a ’90s crime comedy starring Alicia Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro; Julie Taymor’s Beatles jukebox musical; Aardman’s foray into CG animation) — 
but, most pertinently, solid TV thrillers like Archangel and Spies of Warsaw. Sadly, their work on The Bank Job lives up to none of these. The dialogue is clunky, every declaration on the nose, and the characters have a habit of discussing their secrets loudly in public places — the apparent lack of volume control in every performance is astonishing.
Mostly, it feels like it wants to be a Guy Ritchie movie — obviously there’s the throwback London gangster milieu, but also that it features disparate-but-connected plot threads, and the way it cuts between them, sometimes jumping back & forth in time… it’s all very Lock Stock or Snatch. Obviously the blame for much of this lies at the feet of director Roger Donaldson, who’s had the film shot in a kind of polished version of Ritchie’s style, too — it’s all very clean-looking, without the picturesque grittiness that’s part of Guy’s initial efforts.
Yet for all that derivativeness and almost homogenisation, the story’s a good’un; and if the quality cast can’t exactly elevate the material, they can at least keep it ticking over. Is the narrative good enough to overcome the filmmaking shortcomings? Your mileage may vary. I liked it almost in spite of itself — I suspect there was an even better film to be had out of this exact setup.
For his most recent historical epic, Ridley Scott tackles the story of Moses. It’s easy to nitpick, depending on your proclivities: whitewashed cast; lack of adherence to the Bible; Ridley’s typically flexible attitude to historiography; it was even banned in Egypt for the negative depiction of both rulers and slaves.
As much as I love Game of Thrones, and think 
Watching this, it’s difficult to imagine anyone involved really believed they would get a sixth season — which is good, because (a) they stood very little chance, and (b) that means it wraps everything up to a nice, proper ending. My feelings on Jonah “brother of Christopher” Nolan’s cyber-thriller have oscillated over the years, and I’m a long way from agreeing with those who assert it’s actually one of the best sci-fi series ever; but for a show that started out as a fairly standard CBS procedural thriller, it did ultimately manage to play with and work around the network’s expectations to produce something superior. It’s a shame they clearly had to rush the final arc (marred further by having to hit a quota of ‘case of the week’ episodes, for some reason), but it still got to a good place. If you’ve not watched it but are interested, consider finding one of those “episodes you should definitely watch” guides (like 
In the end, this turned out to be less of a TV prequel to the comic book series than an expanded and rejigged adaptation of the comic’s opening four-issue story arc (with some stuff from later thrown in for added fuel). As Seth Rogen explained on the post-finale chat show Talking Preacher, the books throw an awful lot of quite comic-book-y ideas at you very quickly, and TV viewers maybe needed a little longer to digest all of that. Plus extra space to develop and examine the characters, of course. It’ll be interesting to see how future seasons handle the issue of adaptation. By the end of season one, the characters are in a place to launch into something closer to the rest of the comic; but, at the same time, budget issues have already forced some reimagining, so what else will it be forced to compromise or reinvent? I think the bold, fearless barminess of the TV series has earned it the right to our attention, whether it goes further off piste or hews closer still to its roots.
This month, I have mostly been missing… not that much, really. With the Olympics dominating the good TV channels and much of US drama on its summer hols, there doesn’t seem to have been much on. I haven’t gone crazy for Rio 2016 like I did for London 2012 (much to my surprise at the time, that was), though we’ve caught bits and pieces, not least Max Whitlock’s double gold (along with 
Score: 
Shakespeare gets transposed to 1970s Pennsylvania in this blackly comedic reimagining of Macbeth, which converts the Thane of Glamis into a diner chef and the Scottish throne into ownership of a new concept: drive-thru.
though this time there’s an added dose of romance in pretty much every plotline. It works because the cast are so darn good at delivering their material. Dev Patel and Maggie Smith are both hilarious, though everyone gets a moment to shine in the comedy stakes; conversely, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy carry the heart of the movie — though, again, everyone gets their emotional moment.
12-year-old Peter (Levi Miller) lives in an orphanage in World War 2 London… until the night pirates bungee in through the ceiling and kidnap a bunch of boys onto their flying galleon. Yes, really. From there it’s second star to the right and straight on ’til morning as the pirates take their new charges to Neverland, where they’re forced into the 
As said boy, Levi Miller manages to make Peter not intensely irritating, which is an achievement compared to other adaptations. Some of that is surely inherited from the writing and directing, but Miller gives a strong performance too. Hugh Jackman hams it up magnificently as Blackbeard, clearly having a riot. Rooney Mara may be miscast due to the colour of her skin (for all the complaints about whitewashing, her tribe is shown to be mixed race… which doesn’t necessarily excuse it), but her actual performance is very good. I felt like Garrett Hedlund was doing an impersonation of someone but I never quite got a handle on who (the character’s definitely written to be Han Solo, but the actor’s not copying Harrison Ford). Adele Akhtar brings comedy as Hook’s chum, Sam ‘Smee’ Smiegel, there are cameos of varying purpose from Amanda Seyfried and Kathy Burke, and Nonso Anozie is always a welcome presence, here playing Blackbeard’s henchman. Cara Delevingne doesn’t act so much as provide a human reference for the CGI.
Having found Pan to be a very likeable fantasy adventure, I confess to being slightly confused by the response that saw it soundly trounced by most critics and viewers. The 
or Disney’s, aside from my aforementioned aversion to the eponymous hero), so I was perhaps more open to this Epic Fantasy reimagining. (In that last respect, it definitely falls into the same bracket as 
Neill Blomkamp seems to be on M. Night Shyamalan’s career path: a massively-praised Oscar-nominated breakthrough genre movie, followed by a series of increasingly maligned follow-ups.
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