Review: 'How to Rob a Bank' puts a social-media gloss on the heist flick, but dives into serious topics it's not serious enough to handle

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the real-life criminal case of Luigi Mangione — the young man accused of killing a health insurance executive — would inspire someone to write a “Robin Hood”-themed action movie, and now it’s here in the wildly uneven “How to Rob a Bank” and we must deal with it. 

Director David Leitch (“The Fall Guy,” “Atomic Blonde”) gives us an excessively manic screen of social-media screenshots, TikTok-shaped video snippets and cheapjack animation to let us know how terminally online the characters in this movie are. They rob banks, and give instructions to their millions of subscribers about how to follow suit and put a thumb in the eye of our capitalist greed lords. 

The characters’ economics boil down to one line of dialogue that the heist gang’s wolf-masked leader (Nicholas Hoult) tells an FBI agent (John C. Reilly): “When the bank kills people, they don’t get a bullet. They get a bonus.”

The agent, John West, is tasked with trying to catch these tech-savvy bank robbers, who have hit 15 banks in the Pittsburgh area in three months. Hoult’s gang is played by Pete Davidson, Anna Sawai (an Emmy winner for “Shogun”) and Rhenzy Feliz (from “The Penguin”). When his agents come up empty, West goes to Reagan (Zoe Kravitz), a coder on house arrest, to track down the crooks with her special software — which is described for the non-technical among us, like West, as like facial recognition but for objects.

Mark Bianculli’s script, which feels like it was first written in spray paint, eventually gets to the robbers’ motives, both for taking the money and for publicizing their work and methods online. It also gets to why one bank on the crooks’ apparent list has been spared so far, and what the bank’s smug CEO (played by Christian Slater) has to do with it.

Leitch stages some hellacious heist sequences, but he and Bianculli seem to leave a lot of opportunities on the table — things the script sets up early in the movie that it never capitalizes on later. Leitch also has difficulties with tone management, raising some dark issues that sap any fun from this otherwise crowd-pleasing action movie.

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‘How to Rob a Bank’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some violence and brief drug use. Running time: 122 minutes.