It’s A Dirty Job, But…

A friend of mine who reads a lot of what appears on this blog was until recently in the – to my mind – somewhat unusual position of having no idea who Jason Statham is. As I try to be a good friend myself, I did my best to rectify this, by – er – telling him Mr Statham’s career in precis, recommending a good place to start with the canon (I still find it hard to think of a better choice than The Transporter), sending him endless links to Statham-related material on popular video-sharing websites, etc.

Unfortunately the problem I now have is that my friend is wont to make various snide comments about Mr Statham being a rotten actor, appearing in invariably predictable and dubious films, and so on. It is trying, and all the more so because at the back of my mind I do wonder if he does not perhaps have a point. Could it not be that my own fondness for the tropes and staples of the canon are either clouding my judgement or – even worse – ironically based?

Well, it’s always a relief to discover a genuinely accomplished Statham vehicle and one recently crossed my path in the shape of Roger Donaldson’s 2008 movie The Bank Job, and a somewhat-topical shape it is too (more on this later). The first sign that this film is unusual is that Jason Statham does not play the Jason Statham Character – or if he does, the Character is much more heavily modulated than usual. Rather than a lone, reserved, lethally skilled pro with a strict code of honour, Statham plays a small time crook and second-hand car dealer named Terry Leather, living in early 70s London with his wife and kids.

But then Terry and his mates are approached by old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows – almost a candidate for the Whatever Happened To…? file these days), with a proposition. She’s become aware of a bank in central London where the alarm systems have been temporarily disabled, leaving the vault vulnerable. The safe deposit boxes within contain enough valuables to solve all their problems.

However, what Saffron isn’t telling the lads is that she’s been put up to the job by a senior member of MI5, who are themselves interested in laying their hands on the contents of one particular box. This is the property of radical black agitator, pimp and gangster Michael X, and contains his insurance to keep the authorities off his back – extremely compromising photos of a senior member of the Royal Family.

Soon Terry and the gang are busily planning their heist, completely unaware of how they’re being puppeteered, or the shadowy forces (of both the British Establishment and organised crime) that they risk seriously antagonising if they are successful…

Jason Statham’s name may be the one above the title, but this is a movie stuffed with talent, if not quite the biggest names. Roger Donaldson has made some quality films (also Cocktail, which an attractive young lady with whom I was recently enjoying a drink declared to be the best film ever made – the evening had gone so promisingly until then), while the script is from Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, script doctors of Never Say Never Again and The Rock, and writers of many classic TV shows. The supporting cast includes Peter Bowles, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Colin Salmon and David Suchet.

So this looks like it should be a classy production, and so it turns out to be – much more of a thriller than a full-on action movie, and one with a genuinely engrossing and plausible story. The film claims to be based on actual events, news coverage of which was suppressed by the government due to the Royal involvement. I don’t know, ructions over naughty pictures of a Princess – it’s like peering into another world, isn’t it? The film is initially very coy as to who the misbehaving scion of the monarchy might be, leaving my mind to boggle as to what a young Princess Anne might have got up to – but a later shot makes it fairly clear it’s actually intended to be the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, from whom this sort of thing might almost be expected. Hmm.

Anyway, this is a movie with a lot of characters, numerous angles to the story, and – initially at least – a rather complicated narrative structure, so there was a lot of potential for things to come unstuck here. But they absolutely don’t: Donaldson, Clement and La Frenais marshal their tale with great deftness and economy, and what results is not just coherent but genuinely involving and well-performed. As you would expect from a script by these writers, to begin with the film has a faintly comic tone, with perhaps even faint echoes of The Lavender Hill Mob, but as the story progresses it becomes much darker.

This is far from being just the story of a bank robbery: it’s just as concerned with the machinations behind the story and the desperate predicament Terry and the gang realise they are in. The actual heist is concluded by the end of the movie’s second act and at this point the tone shifts considerably: there are moments of vicious brutality and more than one violent death, and yet this is carefully-enough handled for it not to seem jarring or off-putting.

Jason Statham does not get to take his shirt off, chase anyone around or fight twelve people in a garage: he does repeatedly go into a garage, but this is only because his character owns it. In fact, he barely gets to do any action throughout the movie – his big confrontation is with David Suchet, a man in his sixties, and hardly an opponent in his league. Nevertheless, he gives a very credible and charismatic leading man performance that bodes well for his future career, once all those ab crunches start to seem like too much effort. On paper it might look as though Statham could be the weak link in this production: but quite the opposite is true.

The only real brick I can sling at this film is to do with the cinematography, which is just a bit too bright and bland and clean and lacking in atmosphere. This is a film set in a dingy, faded, nasty world of decades ago, but the look of thing could be that of a contemporary rom-com. To give an example from within the Statham canon, I would say that Killer Elite probably isn’t as good a movie as this one, but at least it looks like it’s happening in the time it’s supposedly set in.

I always get a bit wary when people start putting performers and series off in their own categories with their own sets of critical criteria – the dreaded irony threatens, and besides, if something’s good, it should be good by any standards. And yet if you asked me if The Bank Job was the best Jason Statham movie, I would probably say no – the best of his crazy, silly, full-on action movies have a charm I just can’t explain. Nevertheless, judged by sane critical standards, this is an impressive and entertaining thriller, with more to offer the discerning audience than virtually anything else Statham has made.