The Cinema of the Four

The Bank Job

It had been many years since my great-grandfather, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, had been featured in anything on a movie screen in a proper cinema. His Baker Street lads had gone wanting for that sort of diversion, and were having to content themselves with video of features gone by. But then, in March of 2008, as winter still refused to release much of the country from its clutches came a “sort-of” Sherlock Holmes film to at least give them some small reason to complain about the current cost of ticket prices and how popcorn is now ten times what it cost when they were lads and lasses.

I refer, of course, to “The Bank Job,” a new film inspired by a true story that was, seemingly, inspired by a Sherlock Holmes story. While not a Sherlock Holmes movie, “The Bank Job” can at least claim to be a second-cousin, in an odd sort of way.

In 1971, a team of bank robbers tunnelled into a Baker Street bank vault from a nearby shop and started emptying out safe deposit boxes, a scheme very similar to that concocted by John Clay (or Professor Moriart, or Conan Doyle, depending upon your personal preference) in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Red-headed League.” In real life, not all the gang was caught, nor all of the loot recovered. (And there was, according to one source, a scrawl on the vault wall reading “Let Sherlock Holmes solve this.”)

If the tunnel plot were not enough, however, this film adaptation purports to let out previously unpublicized parts of the plot: enough blackmail material to make Charles Augustus Milverton salivate, royal scandal, political corruption, secret service plottings . . . a real trunkload of things one found in other Sherlock Holmes stories. Unlike a Holmes tale, however, this one isn’t about a detective trying to unravel the crime – it’s about some criminals trying to hold their lives together when the bank robbery they’ve planned gets very, very complicated.

Action movie staple Jason Statham doesn’t get as much punching and kicking is as he does normally, but as the gang’s leader he holds down the sympathetic center of a well-paced film with a lot of details and interweaving plot threads.

If you don’t remember the Baker Street bank robbery, or even if you remember having heard of its similarity to the mattter of the Red-Headed League, “The Bank Job” is a film well worth seeing. Truth can definitely be stranger than fiction, and when all is said and done, the real truth of the matter may be even stranger than what is recounted in this extraordinary film. Once one has seen the movie, I recommend a little study upon the events which inspired it. Nothing like it in the history of crime.

What Great-grandfather Sherlock might have said:
“I am amply repaid by having had an experience which is in many ways unique, and by hearing the very remarkable narrative.”