‘How to Rob a Bank’ Leads a Hollow Revolution

There are few things more frustrating than when a movie is two drafts away from being genuinely great and settles for just being okay instead. That’s the feeling that colors How to Rob a Bank, the new action-comedy heist thriller from Bullet Train and The Fall Guy director David Leitch. It’s a movie that echoes fast-paced heist classics like Point Break and Set It Off with a dose of politically righteous fury meant to tap into our current pissed off, hyper-online moment. Yet despite some occasional sparks of greatness, it never gels the way that it should. How to Rob a Bank wants to be a rallying cry for social revolution via internet community building, but it winds up feeling more like a mindless TikTok scroll.

It's a bummer because the setup is strong. A never-hotter Nicholas Hoult leads a quartet of criminals who rob banks in animal masks and then upload braggy “how to” guides on their YouTube channel—like if MrBeast suddenly went all Frank Abagnale Jr. With a pre-heist rallying cry of “Let’s make content,” Ryan (Hoult), Emi (Anna Sawai), Vince (Pete Davidson), and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) are as concerned with getting artistic drone shots and racking up views as they are with pulling off the actual robberies. “We teach our followers how to steal from the banks that steal from them,” Ryan brags from behind his signature wolf mask. They’re one-part postmodern Robin Hoods who donate a good chunk of their stolen cash to charities while spreading a revolutionary message and one-part traditional influencers who plug links to all the items they use for heisting in case their followers want to buy them too.

It's a hyperactive, satirical reimagining of how the Occupy Wall Street ethos has evolved in the influencer era. Except the more the movie relies on YouTube video aesthetics to carry its narrative, the more it starts to feel like Leitch just had very limited time on set with his ostensible lead actors and came up with the mask conceit to hide that fact. It’s over a third of the way into the movie before we actually get to know the “wolf pack” as characters and even then, they only get about a scene apiece to establish their personalities and virtually none to highlight their dynamic as a group. Instead, a good chunk of screen time is devoted to a parallel throughline in which FBI Agent West (John C. Reilly) recruits stoner hacker Reagan (Zoë Kravitz) to help him track down the robbers. But while Reilly and Kravitz have solid comedic chemistry together, they mostly wind up feeling like mouthpieces to debate whether the thief influencers are bold social revolutionaries or dangerous anarchists.

While the fun of the heist genre usually comes from its unexpected twists and turns, there’s something oddly straightforward about How to Rob a Bank. For some reason, Mark Bianculli’s screenplay treats the wolf pack’s motivations as some big secret even though everything they do is a natural continuation of the banks-are-ripping-you-off, screw-the-man ethos they espouse in their videos from the beginning. It doesn’t help that the way the movie hyper-focuses on banks alone as the source of all evil seems weirdly simplistic for a story about systemic inequality.

That wouldn’t be such a problem if How to Rob a Bank were just aiming for high-adrenaline fun, but though it’s got a goofy streak, it wants to take its story to more serious, high-stakes dramatic places as well. That’s good news when it comes to Davidson turning in a surprisingly emotionally rich performance as a dad trying to do right by his kid; less so when it comes to How to Rob a Bank finding a consistent tone. There’s an odd mismatch where the film seems to want to connect to a Gen Z audience raised on frenetically edited YouTube content and are just starting to understand how unfair the world truly is. Except the characters are all in their 30s dealing with issues about parenting, marriage, and the fallout of the War on Terror, which don’t exactly seem like central Gen Z concerns at the moment. If it’s all meant to be a portrait of aging millennials radicalizing the younger folks behind them, the multi-generational angle got lost in translation.  

As turn-off-your-brain fun, How to Rob a Bank is a watchable enough popcorn flick. Leitch’s John Wick-honed action background keeps the story propulsive with car chases, explosions, and random bits of parkour. But in a year where I Love Boosters offered a much more thoughtful, original riff on similar themes, it also feels disposable. For a movie that devotes so much of its runtime to characters directly lecturing to the camera, How to Rob a Bank just doesn’t have much to say.

How to Rob a Bank opens in theaters on November 13. Caroline Siede is a film and TV critic who runs the newsletter Girl Culture.