Skip it. How to Rob a Bank has a premise built for trashy fun and a cast that can deliver it, but director David Leitch keeps routing his own robberies through the crew’s slick YouTube edits of themselves, so two hours pass watching footage about people rather than watching the people. It is a strange thing to do to a heist movie, and it is the reason almost nothing here lands the way it should.
Nicholas Hoult plays Ryan, known online as the Wolf, who leads a four-person crew robbing banks across Pittsburgh in giant animal masks and posting each job as a web series almost before the vault closes. Rhenzy Feliz edits the videos, Pete Davidson plays a combat veteran with a family to support, and Anna Sawai plays Ryan’s partner and the crew’s strategist, with John C. Reilly’s veteran FBI agent John West and Zoe Kravitz’s house-arrested hacker Reagan Gardner closing in from the other side of the case, as The Hollywood Reporter lays out the cast. The trailer sells the pop-up-graphics texture the whole argument below is built on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORxw68y3lyw
The choice that sinks the picture is a formal one, and Leitch’s own team describes it without apology. The in-universe videos were shot on prosumer digital cameras and the unmasked drama on 35mm, with a stunt crew Leitch nicknamed the “YouTube unit” handling the masked robberies while Hoult, recovering from a torn ACL suffered shortly before production, carried the quieter scenes himself. That split is how the film got made in 40 days instead of the 86 Leitch spent on The Fall Guy, and it shows in every job: the masks cover Hoult’s face, the graphics interrupt the tension, and the character beats arrive late enough to feel grafted on. The Prague Reporter named the cost precisely, writing that “the central problem is that we experience much of the robbers’ activity through their own stylized online videos,” an approach that, the review adds, “distances us dramatically from our heroes.”
The rest of the notices are blunter. Mashable calls it a “toothless bank robbery movie” with “the psychological depth of a kiddie pool,” Awards Radar hands out 2.5 stars for something “all style over substance, lacking any nuance or complexity,” and even Deadline’s friendlier review admits “the film self-deconstructs itself so often it’s hard to get a grip on what it’s ultimately trying to say.” IndieWire gets closest to generous, calling it “Leitch’s YouTube-era fairy tale,” which explains why a teenager raised on the real thing might enjoy the cuts and why anyone hoping for a serious argument about money will be done waiting before the first job wraps.
The film’s best asset is sitting in a better movie next door. The Prague Reporter found Reilly “terrific as Agent West, a weary but engaging investigator whose determination to catch the criminals makes him the film’s most sympathetic presence,” and said Kravitz “also shines as Reagan.” The News-Herald called them “an odd but appealing pair”. Reilly plays a man doing quiet arithmetic on a career nearly finished, and Kravitz gives her hacker a loose, unhurried authority the masked kids never earn. (Mashable disagrees, measuring the banter against Lethal Weapon and finding it short, which is fair, though the two actors still look like they wandered in from a film that trusted them more.)
The irony is worth one line. A studio owned by Jeff Bezos financed an eat-the-rich heist movie that, as IndieWire put it, “wouldn’t dare to take aim at massive corporations that widen the wealth gap.” The villain stays a single predatory bank manager, played by Christian Slater, never a boardroom. Leitch told The Hollywood Reporter “there was never any pushback from the studio about what we were making,” which says less about Amazon MGM’s nerve than about how little the finished film actually threatens.
Leitch’s run goes from John Wick through Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy, which opened to $27.7 million and finished with $92.9 million domestic. This one carries a tracking forecast of $10 million to $15 million for its opening weekend, after Amazon MGM moved it off its Labor Day date to chase a bigger 18-to-34 crowd over Thanksgiving instead. That is a modest number for a Leitch picture, and it lands as his most ambitious misfire rather than his usual reliable one. He was clearly after something about a generation turning crime into content because the economy stopped working for them, and that idea survives in the 35mm scenes he shoots like he means it.
Skip it in theaters, where the format problem is the whole experience. When it turns up streaming, the Reilly and Kravitz investigation is worth the fast-forward button to find, even if the crew they are chasing never becomes more than footage of itself.
