Entertainment

ACCRUES INTEREST

RIGHT, mate. There’s this MI5 man, or pos sibly MI6. There’s your royal family in trouble, a drug bust, a hard man called Perky, a tailor called the Major, a radical with a book deal, a brothel, heaps of porno, bent coppers, politicians who like to be whipped, dirty pictures of same and a bank robbery.

That’s just the first half of “The Bank Job,” yeah?

Jason Statham, possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era, stars in a complicated and clever imagining of what might have happened in the mysterious 1971 London bank heist dubbed the “Walkie-Talkie Robbery” – in other words, it was unbelievably high-tech.

The heist was hushed up by the press after four days, soon to be followed by other strange results. Many of the crime’s victims – the robbers stole only from safe deposit boxes – declined to claim their losses. Lots of Old Bill – police – and a porn king were nicked, and there was a murder in the West Indies.

Roger Donaldson’s knowing and tightly directed movie (which will occasionally puzzle those who don’t speak fluent Brit), takes the outlines of what’s known and colors in the rest with so many varieties of venality and corruption it could scarcely be more believable.

It begins with a sketchy embarrassment involving the royal family and a Black Power thug called Michael X who keeps escaping justice. To snag him, a secret agent from either MI5 or MI6 (the FBI and CIA of Britain) arranges for his ex-model girlfriend (Saffron Burrows) to get arrested.

She calls him not suspecting he set her up, at which point he offers to make the charges disappear. In return he asks one little favor: Could she possibly gather some of her lowlife friends to rob a bank?

The stakes are high: “I know if this stuffs up I’m in poo-poo land,” says the model. She interests a used-car salesman (Statham) who owes a lot of money to guys who keep coming in to beat up his cars as practice for his kneecaps. He, too, is worried: What “if it all goes pear-shaped?” he wonders.

With its cockneys and coppers and the caper that comes a cropper, the movie is fully engaging on several levels.

The dialogue and 1971 styles are great cracking fun, and though the heist itself is relatively simple, its complications explode upward (into the realm of high officials) and downward (the porn king’s lair), with police on both sides and our scruffy crew caught in the middle.

Things become so unhinged that at one point Lord Mountbatten, formerly the Viceroy of India, strolls into the heart of the action and no one stops to gawk.

By that point, anyone could be on any side and playing any game; you wouldn’t be surprised if Queen Liz herself dropped by to say, “It’s the cozzers, scarper!”

THE BANK JOB

Bleeding good caper.

Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, sexual situations, violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Union Square, the Chelsea, others.