‘How to Rob a Bank’ Review: Nicholas Hoult and Zoë Kravitz Take Their Paychecks in an Annoyingly Flashy, Emotionally Turgid Influencer-Age Heist Movie

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There’s a degree of second-hand embarrassment that comes from watching David Leitch’s Amazon-backed, influencer-age heist movie “How to Rob a Bank.” It’s a film that bids so desperately for cultural relevance, stylistic cool and progressive brownie points that it trips on its own painstaking efforts to astoundingly lame results. What if Deadpool (Leitch directed one of those films, plus “Bullet Train” and “The Fall Guy”) broke the fourth wall to quack at us about his anti-capitalist revolt? Not that popular uprisings are evil, but this aggressively annoying, tonally berserk actioner serves mostly as a reminder that the revolution will not only be televised but digitally packaged and disseminated via the lousiest algorithm.

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As the title promises, YouTube-esque explainer videos featuring four gunmen in wolf masks bring the tips and tricks of bank robbing to a legion of online followers. Headed by the Marx-reading Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), the anonymous crew posts videos of their real-life exploits, with pop-up graphics flashing over blown-out Go-Pro-esque footage of their stick-em-ups and getaways. The erratic opener is one such movie-within-the-movie, passing through the stages of a heist as designed by the crafty group — two minutes at the bank, an anonymous 9/11 call about a mysterious package to divert police attention, and a speedy escape with motorbikes. All of the crew’s robberies throughout the film play out in this twitchy meta-mode, which makes for a bewildering, sloppily overloaded delivery of thrills.

But the reason for this rather ugly framing device is that the team strives to educate the masses in the art of bankrobbing at the expense of being caught. Their Youtube channel includes direct-to-camera rants delivered by their lupine avatars that preach their screw-the-man gospel, entreating their massive following to take back what’s been denied them by the real fat cats and crooks. Most convincing is their claim that the government is too broken and incompetent to do anything about it, giving a Trump-era rationale to their ambitions. But the idea of sympathetic bank robbers flouting a system that only protects the rich and powerful isn’t particularly novel — it’s what underpins many a fine heist film. (There’s even a shoutout to “Point Break” in one scene.) Here, that messaging is spelled out in garish Jokerman typeface.

As Ryan and his collaborators — wig-wearing decoy Emi (Anna Sawai), backup muscle Vince (Pete Davidson) and hacker Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) — continue robbing banks and making content, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars along the way, FBI agent John West (a weirdly humorless John C. Reilly) recruits deadpan tech-wiz Raegan (a quirked-up Zoë Kravitz) as his sidekick. Raegan is on house arrest after creating an illegal software that can triangulate someone’s location by culling through online images, and but when John shows up at her Pittsburgh apartment — trying to ignore the Cheetos in her hair and the smell of weed — he promises to clear her charges in exchange for using her invention to track down the wolf-pack.

Their rapport gives the investigation a buddy-cop vibe that’s meant to be cute and breezy, but Mark Bianculli’s script relies on clunky wisecracks and labored eccentricities that flatten whatever low-bubbling chemistry the actors share. In any case, the intentionally odd pairing of pragmatic cop and stoner chick allows for thematically appropriate banter about the meaning of justice and peacekeeping in a chaotic and corrupt society.

According to the film’s press notes, the four bankrobbers are meant to be thinly drawn, so that the audience can more easily project themselves onto their respective plights: Vince is a war veteran with a young daughter; Hugo, the son of undocumented immigrants; Ryan and Emi, college sweethearts whose baby boy lost his life when a white-collar insurance scam bankrupted the couple, leaving them unable to pay for his treatment.

In other words, they’re vessels for sadly familiar American grievances, though that doesn’t excuse the perfunctory nature in which their stories are mapped out — or the late-breaking revelations that drop like campy soap-operatic twists. Or the drearily drawn-out emotional reckonings that feel almost offensively unearned (and wildly undeserving of not just one but two plaintive Billie Eillish needle-drops). In fact, at two hours, the whole thing plods along interminably — and in the end, it’s even silly (or shameless) enough to make a case for its own self-importance.