“Based on a true story,” or anyway on a true bank job, the knockover of Lloyds Bank, Baker Street, London, 1971. The filmmakers, headed by the veteran Australian-born director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, have taken advantage of the cloak of mystery that still surrounds the case, to concoct a salacious hypothesis that can’t be disproved, other than by common sense. The British Secret Service, by this scenario, was the prime mover behind the raid, desirous of getting their hands on compromising pornographic photos of Princess Margaret — yes, Princess Margaret, cavorting with dark-skinned natives in the Caribbean — held in the safe-deposit box of a blackmailing Black Militant. But the way it goes down (as we say in the underworld), it is self-refuting. The notion that MI5, from a safe distance, and through a coerced middle-woman, would farm out the operation to an unknowing gang of petty criminals, novices at bank jobs, is ridiculous on the face of it. Ridiculous because of the high probability (assuming the novices could pull off the job in the first place) of its turning out exactly as it turns out on screen: the hot photos ending up in unpredictable hands. If a team of filmmakers can’t find a true story that’s any truer than this, they need to keep looking. Or better yet, start from scratch. The almost farcical complications, if taken with sufficient grains of salt, are diverting enough. And the Seventies period has its pleasures, not just the usual haircuts, bellbottoms, plaids, etc., but all that forgotten Black Power stuff, and most particularly the rolled-back level of technology: a simple jackhammer, a concrete-penetrating blowtorch, some walkie-talkies, and an amateur ham radio that chances to pick up the back-and-forth between the robbers in mid-job. A refreshing change, all that, from the computer-age hocus-pocus of Ocean’s Eleven, …Twelve, …Thirteen, and their ilk. Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, James Faulkner. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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