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3 stars (out of four)

Any heist film containing the line “I will not be lectured by the porn king of Soho!” is on the right track. Throw in a pungent evocation of 1971 London, with its monstrous sideburns and even bigger walkie-talkies, and references to “the big score, the one that makes sense of everything,” and there you have it. Slick, ice-cold and enjoyable, “The Bank Job” is a bit of all right.

Walkie-talkies play a comically old-fashioned role in what became commonly known in Britain as the “Walkie-Talkie Robbery,” reportedly England’s largest ever, on which this fictionalized account is based. Director Roger Donaldson’s film isn’t merely set in 1971; despite being shot on high-definition digital video, in deceptively warm, bright tones, “The Bank Job” moves and feels like a film made in ’71, albeit with slightly less errant zooming going on.

The real-life robbery involved an unidentified group of men who tunneled underneath and into the Baker Street branch of Lloyds  bank. They left with scads of bank notes and an undisclosed number of safe deposit boxes and their contents. No arrests were made. No money was recovered.

The script’s conspiracy theory goes like this: A Black Power revolutionary (Peter De Jersey, venal self-interest incarnate) has incriminating photos of Princess Margaret (she’s never actually named) romping in the altogether in the Caribbean. The photos lie hidden deep in the bank vault. British intelligence, embodied by Richard Lintern’s steely operative, hatches a robbery scheme. Saffron Burrows plays Lintern’s smoky-voiced mistress, whose old flame is Terry, played by top-billed action star and primo snarler Jason St atham.

“The Bank Job” doesn’t fuss around,  though its plotting gets pretty thick at times, and the audience must do a little extra-credit work in sorting out who’s out-maneuvering whom. Terry gathers together a motley crew to execute what he thinks is a straight-forward  cash job. He’s in the dark regarding the job’s true purpose, which means Burrows’ character, Martine, must handle the incriminating photo retrieval very discreetly. You simply cannot trust the birds! Isn’t that clear by now? How many completely honest women ever show up in a heist film, anyway?

Screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Fenais seem determined to reference every sex scandal in recent British governmental history, but the kinky bits aren’t lingered over. The film is violent but not salaciously so (aside from a torture sequence late in the game).
 Donaldson, who began his career with “Smash Palace” and has done both satisfying thrillers (“No Way Out”) and brainless star vehicles (Tom Cruise’s “Cocktail” ), pushes it all forward, restlessly, tilting his camera at precarious angles in a slightly winking way, as if shooting a special guest villain on “Batman.”

St atham and Stephen Campbell Moore, who plays Terry’s No. 2,  make for solid anchors. But it’s David Suchet, best known as Hercule Poirot on the British Agatha Christie series, who steals the show as Lew Vogel, the porn king of Soho. Suchet plays this scumbag  without a speck of caricature, which makes him all the more interesting. The film, which at heart is a sharp, nasty black comedy, comes to especially vivid life whenever Suchet oozes onto the scene.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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