The stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch has an undeniable knack for fight scenes and car chases, and a generational gift for peopling them with the most exasperating bozos imaginable. His sixth feature, How to Rob a Bank, sadly falls closer to the tooth-itching awfulness of 2022’s Bullet Train than the affable lunkery of 2024’s The Fall Guy, though given it is about a crew of YouTubers who go viral for their shrill and visually frantic first-person videos of real-life bank heists, it is hard to imagine it falling anywhere else.
Nicholas Hoult – supposedly in the running to be cast as James Bond but not making a great case for it here – stars as Ryan, a kohl-eyed, bottle-blond loudmouth clad in a wolf costume who regularly carries out major robberies in Pittsburgh, a city of less than 60 sq miles, who has somehow thus far evaded capture by police. Eventually, his and his gang’s antics come to the attention of an FBI agent, played by a jarringly miscast John C Reilly, who joins forces with a gifted young coder (Zoë Kravitz, mired in a nothingy role) to use an AI-assisted surveillance tool to bring these scrappy antiheroes to book.
Yes, antiheroes. For amid the moronic blare of fluorescent text and ersatz memes, Ryan and chums – who are played by Pete Davidson, Anna Sawai and Rhenzy Feliz, and come with one bare-bones exculpatory backstory apiece – style themselves in their videos as latter-day Robin Hoods, nobly striking a blow for the American underclass. (This is punchy stuff from a film whose own anti-capitalist credentials extend to it having been part-produced, financed and distributed by Amazon.)
Since the system gave their generation a four-in-10 chance of owning a house while crushing them with student loans and medical debt, here they are, commendably taking their financial destinies into their own hands.
And the general populace apparently loves it, barks Mark Bianculli’s screenplay, which boldly imagines that an innocent bystander whose car is stolen by the gang will be overjoyed by this glancing association with the HTRAB channel, rather than terrified and/or furious about the theft of his vehicle.
What works? The fight scenes and car chases, which are thinner on the ground than one might hope, but which Leitch and his stunt team stage with rigour and panache. Elsewhere, characters optimistically name check Point Break and Grand Theft Auto between trotting out familiar influencer catchphrases. “Like and subscribe,” exhorts the slogan emblazoned across one of their masks, though this feels more like the occasion for a swift block-and-move-on.
In cinemas from Nov 13