David Leitch weaves a modern Robin Hood for the Tik Tok generation with shades of corporate comeuppance for the working man.
HOW TO ROB A BANK (2026)
★★★ & 1/2 of ★★★★★ stars
Nicholas Hoult has made a name out of being the best thing about any project he is involved withand David Leitch’s How to Rob A Bank, from Amazon MGM Studios, is no exception. In this distaff combination of MR. ROBOT/FIGHT CLUB meets POINT BREAK/THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, Hoult plays Ryan, a man haunted by a tragic incident in his past that cost him emotionally and changed the course of his life at the hands of corporate greed. As a means of making some sort of change in the world, he adopts the persona of an anti-corporate crusader/Robin Hood figure called the Wolf and his gang of GTA styled fellow crusaders rob banks. They don’t just rob banks – they give to the poor, literally. They give money to charities, to people suffering from cancer. Ryan’s wife Emi (Anna Sawai) is their decoy and getaway driver. They also spread their anti-corporate message via insanely popular YouTube videos and Tik Tok videos, edited by Hugo (The Penguin’s Rhenzy Feliz), the gang’s resident creative. Everything sounds good on the surface, but the gang has gotten on the radar of the FBI, specifically John C. Reilly’s Agent West, who has also experienced loss but who doesn’t see the message that Ryan is trying to spread. He recruits Zoe Kravitz’ Reagan, a hacker under house arrest who created a program that correlates data to find commonalities to help find the Ryan and his co-horts. A mission that becomes more timely once West and Reagan start to determine that Ryan’s goal is to rob a mega bank called Vitality Trust in Pittsburgh; a high-security bank that specializes in high-interest medical loans; a new area of growth specialized by the bank’s new president, David Walton (played by Christian Slater). Will the Wolf and his co-horts succeed and what is the reason behind targeting this bank? Those are the questions we explore in HOW TO ROB A BANK.
Director David Leitch, who cut his teeth on the John Wick franchise and before that worked as a stuntman until directing films like DEADPOOL 2, THE FALL GUY, ATOMIC BLONDE, and BULLET TRAIN, really shines hereas this is a stunt-heavy piece just like THE FALL GUY. Hoult plays a likeable hero with a troubled past and he anchors the film with a charismatic and relatable hero. The ensemble in this film compliments that role with Pete Davidson playing a co-hort with a shared trauma that bonds them and his subplot with his child and wife, played by Tati Gabrielle, is one of the highlights of the film. Kravitz and Reilly play the erstwhile good guys in the film who question whether they’re really good going after people who are victims of corporate greed. Slater plays a great villainous corporate goon and his casting is a nod to some of his past roles given the underlying storyline in the film.
I think the film’s big star is the stylistic approach to the film’s narrative. Presented largely in the form of YouTube style long-form edited videos. It allows us to get exposition in a way that doesn’t feel like info dumps but that also speaks to how many people consume information nowadays – through YouTube videos. I know some people will compare these takes to The Big Short’s approach to explaining the financial crisis, but these play to Leitch’s style, epsecially when intercut with stunt sequences that naturally lean into Leitch’s filmmaking style. This also interjects a lot of comedy and humor into the process before the film opens the gates to some of the movie’s deeper themes surrounding the class warfare that health care and debt can place the average American in.
HOW TO ROB A BANK is a fun film and an engaging one that really hooks you in from starts to finish. It hits theaters on November 13th.
Check out more reviews from Victor Moreno at http://cultclassicsaz.com and http://youtube.com/@cultclassics