Crime pays

Two new British crime thrillers make for a great night at the movies

By D.K. Holm

Since it ceased to be a world dominating colonial power, Britain has excelled at only two things: out-of-control pop stars and crime. In reality and in novel form, the UK still puts out the best that the criminal classes have to offer. Two recent excellent crime films, In Bruges and The Bank Job, only reaffirm Great Britain's primacy as the world leader in skullduggery.

Not to give anything away, but In Bruges is something of a shaggy dog story: a stray line of dialogue about a moral principal and a "little person" in the wrong place at the wrong time leads to one sardonic visual punch line of an ending.

Its premise at first seems tired. Two hit men, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and neophyte Ray (Colin Farrell), are sent to a city in Belgium to cool their heels after a botched job. While they wait for the boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to call with further instructions, Ken goes sightseeing and Ray falls in with a girl named Chloe (Clemence Poesy) who turns out to be the drug connection for the crew and stars of some kind of vague film being shot nearby and featuring an American dwarf, Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), in a key role. But though it at first seems to be a tired, overdone idea, the plot soon turns complex, wickedly funny, unpredictable (yet logical), and even poignant.

The film is the brainchild and debutant feature film of the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who has already won an Oscar (for a short film called Six Shooter starring Gleeson) and who admits that his film is an homage to Quentin Tarantino, Sexy Beast, and other recent examples of prismatic crime films. Though one may have entered the theater skeptically, the movie wins the skeptic over, and the more one thinks about it afterwards, the more, well, lovable, it becomes. Yes, you know that Fiennes is channeling Ben Kingsley's Don Logan, that baby-faced rage-spewing id figure from Sexy Beast, but he's still good at it and the payoff is stupendous.

Despite its modest, simple title, The Bank Job is a complex, fast-paced tale that demands your complete attention (and some foreknowledge of the real life players who figure in the 1970s-setplot). Though its premise may remind viewers of Woody Allen's recent Small Time Crooks, the Allen film was based on an old Edward G. Robinson film, Larceny, Inc., while The Bank Job is derived from actual events. In both situations, though, a group of ragtag villains attempts to rob a bank's safe deposit vault by digging a tunnel from a nearby business.

The main villain is Terry Leather (Jason Statham), a car repair shop owner who owes too much money to his bookie. He's approached by an old girl from the neighborhood, Martine Love (Saffron Burrows, whose face is almost a Mad caricature of the pouty, ageless supermodel), who claims that she has some inside info: that a Lloyd's branch on Baker Street is turning off its alarm sensors over a weekend as a prelude to repair on the following Monday. Martine, Terry and his lads (an amateurish assortment of pals and acquaintances) soon dig in. Literally.

But things are not as they seem. Martine, who was caught smuggling drugs from Morocco, is now the tool of MI5's Tim Everett (the incredibly charismatic Richard Lintern). He is tasked with the mission impossible of getting some embarrassing photos out of that vault, pix in the possession of an annoying black radical who has thus far evaded conviction thanks to the photographs. To reveal more of the fast-paced plot would be to chip away at its pleasures, but be on the lookout for David Suchet as a smut king with a kidney stone, and Alan Swoffer as a silent hanger-on of a John Lennon.

But it is some of the small touches I liked the most. Despite not a lot of screen time, Terry's essentially happy marriage to Catherine (Keeley Hawes, of Spooks) is well-chronicled. There's a great little interchange between them in a pub during a wedding party that is beautifully acted, and a later showdown after the heist is almost painful it is so real, and the viewer has been cued to support this union. Despite its brevity, it's one of the best, most mature portraits of a marriage seen in films in ages.

The Bank Job is the sort of movie you see once, then research like crazy, and then see again and again. Director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, the film soleil White Sands) keeps the pace of the script (credited to Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) breakneck, yet funny when need be, and harrowing at certain moments. It makes for a perfect double bill with In Bruges if you happen to find them playing in the same theater. If not, the DVDs will get the job done.