“Let’s make some content!” is a line heard in David Leitch’s absolutely dire new heist thriller How to Rob a Bank. It’s shouted by a member of a thief club that videos its robberies and uploads their exploits to a YouTube channel called “Who’s Hungry?” It’s also just about the only thing one needs to note about this dismal movie. Kids like anti-capitalism these days, right? Well, what if you packed a bunch of platitudes about it into a slick action movie, added a social media hook, and packaged it right up for them? Maybe by watching it, they’ll feel like they’re actually doing something. So what about the irony that this movie was paid for and distributed by Amazon.
Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), fueled by any number of very real grievances (over the U.S. healthcare system, the predatory financial structure, a fundamental lack of accountability for the C-suite class, the treatment of combat veterans — just to name a few sincerely important real-life problems) has taken to robbing banks with his crew. That includes his partner Emi (Anna Sawai), his war buddy Vince (Pete Davidson), and tech guy Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz). As mentioned before, their operations are also turned into glossy videos perfect for handheld viewing on YouTube. To cite another pertinent quote (from The Wire this time), “Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?” It might ultimately be beside the point given how dimwitted this all is, but it’s completely unexplained just how these people think they can get away clean given that they’re self-generating literally hours of incriminating evidence and publishing it on the internet.
Meanwhile, during the course of their exploits they are being chased by FBI agent John West (John C. Reilly, seeming completely adrift here). To aid his efforts, West recruits a hacker, Reagan (Zoë Kravitz), who is under house arrest for developing a massively privacy-shattering surveillance program about which she seems to have no conscience. Given this development and the twisty-turning nature of the subgenre, viewers might suspect that Reagan will eventually be won over to our Robin Hood-esque robbers’ side. But fear not: nothing so predictably interesting is going to happen here.
How to Rob a Bank should be found in the dictionary under the word “toothless.” Its support of material violence against the forces of capitalism is not merely welcome, it ought to be general public policy, but the film’s depiction of it is pandering, childish, and has no interest in what the actual stakes are for anyone truly suffering beyond backstories to motivate its otherwise interiority-free characters. The film can’t even bring itself to advocate for punishment heavier than humiliation for its cardboard villain, a banker peddling risky mortgages designed to drown people in debt. Ultimately, its depiction of social-media-inspired mass protest is about as realistic and nuanced as the ending of Joker, which Leitch’s film glibly resembles, though it can’t even be said to be as amusingly full of shit.
Leitch continues to squander his prodigious talents as an action choreographer and stunt coordinator by directing movies. At least here, as in his last feature The Fall Guy, there is so little action to speak of that he can’t ruin it with his typically rapid editing (although Bank does inexplicably feature scene transitions made to look like film running out in a camera — what that has to do with a movie about YouTube no one can say. If one were to look for some praise to impart, there are two pretty good car pulls, and the film is slathered in a teal and orange color palette that makes it look like it was shot in 2008 — a banner year for the economy, so at least that’s relevant in some way. Still, there have been many disappointing movies movies released in 2026, and many bad movies, and many both bad and disappointing movies. And there are surely a few more left in the chamber over the next month and a half. But it’s tough to imagine one arriving to steal dishonor of worst from How to Rob a Bank, a film difficult to endure and even more depressing to think about.
DIRECTOR: David Leitch; CAST: Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Pete Davidson, John C. Reilly; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: November 13; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 2 min.
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