Дэвид Лейчийн найруулсан “How to Rob a Bank” киноны тойм

The major Hollywood studios tend to shy away from the subject of class warfare because they know they can’t pull them off with a straight face. But young people in this country are increasingly animated by radical leftist ideas like “earning a livable wage” and “being able to buy a home before they die,” and at a certain point the movies will have to meet them where they live. Perhaps that point is now. How else to explain why Jeff Bezos would fund a Robin Hood-esque heist thriller that not only encourages its target demographic to commit armed robberies, but also kinda sorta teaches them how? (No one is going to confuse a David Leitch movie for “The Anarchist Cookbook.”) At a time when internet activists like Hasan Piker have come to occupy more space in the public imagination than Marvel superheroes, selling the masses on fanciful stories about the downward redistribution of wealth might be the billionaire class’ best protection against the threat of it actually happening in real life. It’s a lot more fun than paying a proportional tax rate, at least.

Of course, the poppy and frenetic “How to Rob a Bank” wouldn’t dare to take aim at massive corporations that widen the wealth gap by destroying small businesses, normalizing exploitative labor practices, and accelerating worldwide environmental collapse. This is very specifically a film about how banks are bad and should be fucked with, an opinion that the founder of Amazon might actually share with the average ticket-buyer.

And it’s not like the director of “Bullet Train” suddenly made a serious call to action that’s poised to inspire a wave of copycat robberies. Shot with all the propulsiveness of “Trainspotting” but almost none of its unbridled lust for life, Leitch’s YouTube-era fairy tale is no more dangerous to America’s power structures than “Verity” or “Project Hail Mary” (to name some of its studio’s other recent titles). Compared to the lawlessness of “Grand Theft Auto VI,” it might as well be the “Ocarina of Time” remake “Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.” Still, its cast is hot, its heart is in the right place, and while the Amazon Punk of it all has a tendency to make its fantasy seem more like a sale, there’s something indivisibly real and relatable to the premise of a heist movie whose characters feel like they have to steal the most basic principles of the life they were promised.

Ryan (Nicolas Hoult, channeling a very effective smidgeon of the destructive intensity that made him so terrifying in “The Order”) isn’t trying to get rich or spark a revolution, he and his accomplices just want a fair shot at the same thing that previous generations have been afforded as part of the American contract: The chance to support his family, and maybe a fair shot at revenge against the people and/or system who denied him that opportunity. In most respects, that shot has never been more unfair than it is now, but the internet — which has become the most powerful system for socioeconomic oppression this side of sharecropping — has turned attention into a currency more valuable than cash, and young people are still inventing new ways to harness those riches for themselves.

For Ryan, that process starts with stealing money the old-fashioned way, as he and his four-person crew film themselves knocking off every bank in Pittsburgh (their identities protected by giant animal masks). But the cash seems to be less important than the content that it buys them, as the gang’s real passion is reserved for the splashy, hi-octane YouTube tutorials that Hugo (an upbeat Rhenzy Feliz) cuts together and posts online after each job. “You know what’s more powerful than a gun?,” Ryan says. “An audience.” That’s us! We rule.

What the animal brigade plans to use that audience for is a mystery for most of the movie, but the big reveal is satisfying enough so long as you’re willing to accept your hard-edged socioeconomic commentary with a side of “The Thomas Crown Affair”-flavored silliness. Slapped with titles like “Lowkey Best Heist Ever,” the videos proselytize against complacency, as Ryan — still disguised as “The Wolf,” despite the fact that Hoult’s blond dye job makes his blue eyes pop like crazy — informs the masses that the odds of earning six figures in this economy are less than half the odds of pulling off an armed robbery. Sure, pulling something off isn’t the same thing as getting away with it, but who has time to quibble when they’re being fucked to death by the one percent?

And every member of Ryan’s crew has been done rather dirty. Iraq War vet Vince (an affectingly subdued Pete Davidson as the resident gun expert) has learned the hard way that “a country you fight for may not fight for you,” while Ryan shares a tragic backstory with his partner and getaway driver Emi (a wildly underused Anna Sawai) that only comes out after Mark Bianculli’s script pulls the ripcord on its propulsive first half and settles into its characters’ flimsiness during the comparatively leaden stretch that follows. We never learn anything about how the crew found each other, and unlike in the “Fast & Furious” saga, that familial energy fails to galvanize into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Still, Hoult could get the job done by channeling even a smidgeon of the destructive intensity that he brought to “The Order,” and the religious fervor he instills in Ryan’s mission is enough to keep “How to Rob a Bank” moving forward even when the film is just spinning its wheels. Or, as the case might be, when the film pivots to a parallel track that never meaningfully overlaps with the main plot.

It’s hard to be mad at this movie for casting John C. Reilly as the Al Pacino in an eat the rich Gen-Z “Heat” (not when he gets to bark things like “Put some fucking pepper on it!” at his subordinates), or for pairing him with Zoë Kravitz as a grungy hacker who’s roped into the case in exchange for her freedom (and use of her glossed-over surveillance software), but the mild comedy of their mismatched vibe never compensates for how disconnected they both are from the main plot. Whatever inter-generational friction is gained — and then smoothed over — between them in a movie that makes bizarrely little attempt to weave them into Ryan’s tale. For all of its hashtag agitprop, “How to Rob a Bank” isn’t nearly high-minded enough to justify putting ideas before its plot, and it’s an enormous self-own that Kravitz never so much as interacts with the Hoult side of things.

Be that as it may, Leitch leans into the movie’s digital revolution as hard as circumstances allow, and what his film sometimes lacks in detail or precision it strives to compensate for with smiling verve and some bone-crunching action (there isn’t enough physical violence for this to stack up to the rest of 87North Productions’ body of work, but it’s nice that Leitch shoehorns a few solid brawls into the mix just because he can). Not since “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has a studio movie gotten so much out of Pittsburgh, and the overbroad political messaging of “How to Rob a Bank” is sharpened by its rich sense of place, and specifically the way its locations reflect the story’s larger collision between the old world and the new.

That temporal confusion is well-served by a film that resolves as more of a fairy tale than anything else — a heist movie full of talking animals, and one that hinges on YouTube as a modern form of spellcasting. It’s all just real enough to suggest that we have the power to make it realer.

Grade: B-

Amazon MGM Studios will release “How to Rob a Bank” in theaters on Friday, November 13.