Rating: 5/10

Starring

Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore

The Plot

Statham heads a team of tunneling misfits under a London bank to loot safety deposit boxes. They unknowingly make off with compromising pictures of royalty and all sorts of other scandalous swag, making them the targets of government agents, crooked cops and criminals alike.

The Good

Statham charges through the final 30 minutes with the energy he’s brought to his previous films – the scruffy, confident swagger that viewers – love him or hate him – have come to expect. The finale is much more interesting than the plot that leads up to it.

The Bad

The finale doesn’t give quite enough to make it worth the wait. The first two-thirds move like Grandpa’s Buick, rolling along at a snail’s pace. None of the cast, all English B-listers except Statham, brings anything remarkable to the table, and each scandalous plot twist makes the story less and less comprehensible.

The Lowdown

“The true story of a heist gone wrong,” says the film’s Web site. But the movie states at the end that details about the “walkie-talkie bank job” have been classified by the British government until the 2050’s, prompting the obvious question: What did writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais base their story on?

According to British newspaper The Observer, a recording of the robbers’ walkie-talkie conversation was broadcast on the radio, providing a few lines of authentic dialogue for the film, but a government “D Notice” silenced the press and locked away any more info on the case.

This isn’t the first time Hollywood has taken liberties with “true” stories, but hear this Clement and La Frenais: If you have to make adjustments to or downright fabricate historical details, you have no excuse when your movie turns out to be Dullsville.