Robbed of vice

The Bank Job doesn't just give us licence to enjoy two hours of grand larceny, it turns robbery into a rousing virtue.

That's because this heist flick — based on the real 1971 Lloyds Bank raid in London — amounts to a war between the haves and the have-nots.

That hoity-toity British lord? Bad. Those MI5 agents shaking down the club proprietor? Evil.

But those cockneys tunnelling towards a vault full of money, intent on stealing everything? Heroes.

Sympathy for a class

This is because they're hard-luck blokes, the kind who used to go to war for the British empire but are nowadays the first to get sacrificed in Machiavellian games designed to save the upper class from scandal.

And in this kind of world, the only victory is for the little man to walk away with the loot.

That's the premise of Roger Donaldson's entertaining movie, based on the few known facts of the original case.

When the real robbers made off with a haul worth more than £4 m illion (Dh28.8 million) from a Lloyds bank, the aftermath was anything but normal.

No official arrests were made. No money was returned. The government issued a gag order on the details of the crime. Soon, the whole matter had disappeared.

What happened to the perpetrators? What did they find in those security boxes?

And what did a radio operator named Robert Rowlands hear when he intercepted walkie-talkie transmissions among the robbers?

That's the starting point for Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who weave a sort of post-modern Robin Hood allegory out of the whole affair.

When Terry (Jason Statham), owner of a failing car dealership in London, gets wind of a bank alarm system that has been temporarily shut off, he thinks he's walking into a sure thing. But we know what's coming.

Although The Bank Job provides all the knuckle-whitening rituals of the heist — poring over blueprints, synchronising wristwatches and disposing of tunnel dirt — its real purpose is to expose the conspiracy around the thieves.

Different from real life

The suspense amounts to whether Terry and his mates (a likeable round of actors, including Daniel Mays and Stephen Campbell Moore) can beat the insidious odds.

Which would make their venture, if successful, a victory for the underclass against the spooks and snobs of life.

We hasten to add, of course, that in real life, we abhor bank robbers, those faceless enemies of society who steal our hard-earned money.

But in heist films, they become agents of our secret wish fulfilment, bagging and hauling what we dare not, ignoring consequences we dare not.

So when one such as The Bank Job comes along to make these crimes feel almost principled, we don't just feel good about rooting for those guys, we even feel right about it.

Perhaps, most importantly, The Bank Job is effortless fun, moving along at the speed of a caper.

There is no portentousness, no cultural or sociological lecture, just a pedigreed troupe of actors playing with polished abandon.

Statham does well enough as a cockney character for this generation and brings a likeable, believable innocence to his role, as the character tries to make sense of the dark clouds enfolding him. We can't help but wish him Godspeed and riches.