Skip it. How to Rob a Bank is a $40 million heist comedy built around a gimmick instead of a plot, and 122 minutes is too long to ride a gimmick alone.
David Leitch’s crew of Pittsburgh robbers posts every job to a channel called Who’s Hungry? and dares the internet to copy them. Ryan, the bleached-blond ringleader played by Nicholas Hoult behind a wolf mask, says the thesis straight into the camera: “You know what’s more powerful than a gun?” he asks. “An audience.” Deadline’s review catches the line on its way out.
The movie never earns it. Every robbery runs through the same twitchy filter, pop-up graphics and blown-out action-camera footage laid over a two-minute bank clock, a fake 911 call about a mysterious package, a motorbike getaway. Once, that’s a joke about content culture. By the fourth job it’s just the movie repeating itself with new wallpaper.
THR chief critic David Rooney needs five words for the problem: “the fun wears a bit thin.”
The best set piece in the film has nothing to do with the gimmick. It’s the garage fight, and Hoult did most of it himself after tearing his ACL shortly before production and sticking with physical therapy three times a week rather than drop out. “He’s a tough cookie, and he did a lot of his own stuff,” Leitch told The Hollywood Reporter. “That fight scene in the garage was probably his biggest physical set piece, and it was mostly him.” That’s the kind of practical commitment the studio heist comedy is supposed to be built on. It shows up in one scene and then gets buried under the social-media framing device for the rest of the runtime.
Because once the pop-up graphics run out of road, the script goes shopping for stakes it never built. Ryan and his wife lost a son to an insurance scam. A crew member came home from Afghanistan to a VA that failed him. Another is hiding his undocumented grandmother. Rooney’s summary is the kindest read available: “Basically, it turns into a different movie.”
That pivot explains the split on Rotten Tomatoes: 33 percent from critics against roughly 80 percent from the people who actually bought a ticket. The audience got the genre ride they paid for. The critics got a sermon with a getaway car welded to the front of it.
Here’s the fair part. Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri found it “one of the more moral movies of the year” and called it a blast outright. Deadline’s Damon Wise agreed that “whenever it’s doing exactly what it says on the tin, it’s a blast.” Zoë Kravitz, as the housebound hacker who eats in every scene and names her guinea pig Morpheus, gives the film its only comic rhythm that survives the editing. Pete Davidson’s closing scene is, per Rooney, “intensely moving,” arguably his best work since The King of Staten Island. Hoult and Kravitz completists, the 80 percent crowd, and heist fans willing to take a B- for one great fight scene will have a decent Friday.
What this formula actually needed, and what Leitch’s two previous movies both had, is a face the poster can sell. Bullet Train opened to $30 million. The Fall Guy opened to $27.7 million, because Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling were on the marquee, not a wolf mask. This one opened to $4.7 million for the full frame, including a $2.2 million Friday that counted $900,000 in Thursday previews, with a B- CinemaScore sitting below the A- The Fall Guy pulled. That 33 percent is the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of Leitch’s career, under even Bullet Train’s 53 percent.
Amazon MGM moved the release off Labor Day to chase the 18-34 crowd for Thanksgiving, Deadline reported over the summer. Men under 25 made up only 21 percent of opening weekend, and Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro didn’t soften the diagnosis: “The movie needed more of the latter to show up to make this work.” It’s a studio chasing a demographic with a marketing hook instead of a star, and the demographic didn’t show.
The irony writes itself. A movie whose entire argument is that an audience beats a gun couldn’t get an audience into 2,810 theaters. The 80 percent who did show up got their money’s worth out of a wolf mask, a guinea pig named Morpheus and one genuinely great garage fight. Everyone debating whether to chase this one down after reading the business case Amazon was actually making with the release date should just wait, and let the content find them on a smaller screen where it was always going to live anyway.
