How to Rob a Bank (dir. David Leitch)

by Jack Martin | Nov 15, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 122 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures / Amazon MGM Studios

UK Release Date: 13 November 2026

WHO’S IN HOW TO ROB A BANK?

Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Pete Davidson, John C. Reilly, Christian Slater, Tati Gabrielle, Paul Sparks, Young Mazino, Andrew Schulz, Alessandra Frugoli

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

David Leitch (director, producer), Mark Bianculli (writer, producer), Jeb Brody, Brian Grazer, Allan Mandelbaum and Kelly McCormick (producers), Dominic Lewis (composer), Jonathan Sela (cinematographer), Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A group of bank robbers become an online sensation after livestreaming their heists…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HOW TO ROB A BANK?

There’s an unfortunate sense of irony that Amazon – the corporation that has been rightfully criticised for its frequent exploitation of hard-working labourers, soulless fulfilment centres and monstrous working conditions – is behind How to Rob a Bank, a film that actively rallies its audience against powerful corporations and the fundamental capitalist systems in which they thrive at the expense of the less fortunate.

Although, one can’t help but wonder if director David Leitch’s film is an act of reverse psychology on Amazon’s part, since it presents its own screw-the-system protagonists as the most irritating, self-satisfied, personality-free hoodlums imaginable, to a point where you could logistically make a point that it is secretly a pro-capitalism movie at its heart. Or at least, that’s the only reason I can come up with as to how this movie, as annoyingly smug and vacuous as it already is, can get away with being so mind-numbingly unappealing while still technically being in the right about what it’s trying to say.

The film follows a small group of bank robbers – consisting of their leader Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), his girlfriend Emi (Anna Sawai), war veteran Vince (Pete Davidson) and tech specialist Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) – whose USP is that every single heist they conduct, they livestream to their social media profiles. The footage is then edited together into a series of YouTube videos titled “How to Rob a Bank” in which Ryan, concealing his identity with a wolf mask, gives useful advice on what goes into a straightforward bank robbery, as well as sharp critiques of the capitalist imbalances that they actively encourage their audience to rebel against. Naturally, their content goes viral and creates a nationwide movement, further angering FBI agent John West (John C. Reilly – and yes, his character does appear to be named after a prominent tuna brand) who, having been tasked with bringing down the gang at all costs, recruits convicted hacker Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz) to track them down using the very software she unleashed upon the world.

What starts off as this very Gen-Z coded edition of Point Break (a film that characters in this very movie directly reference) quickly begins chasing its own tail without any sense of where it’s eager to go. The structure within Mark Bianculli’s script is wildly chaotic, with little to no progression as it just keeps throwing things at you and expects you to care about it all from the moment they make contact with your body. By the time we first meet this central band of outlaws, not only has their online presence grown to extravagant heights, but they’ve already inspired countless copycats and tribute acts across the country, and yet we know absolutely nothing about them or the superficial reasons as to why they’re targeting such powerful targets, let alone broadcasting it to the entire world. Even as such reasons become slightly clearer, these characters have so little going for them in terms of their motivations and supposed charisma, that you feel nothing for them and to a point actually want them to get caught by the likes of Reilly and Kravitz, whose own mismatched yet still undercooked dynamic is far more compelling than any of the supposed heroes combined.

It’s bad enough to endure the emptiness of the script and its hollow messaging with the most soapbox dialogue since 2019’s Black Christmas, but Leitch somehow makes it more intolerable with an overly flashy, migraine-inducing visual style that reeks of the early-to-mid 2000s, and not in a good way. Like a lot of Leitch’s films, it clearly adopts a humorous tone when showing this gang’s exploits through their YouTube videos (which, incidentally, are overedited in all the worst ways that a YouTube video can be: not even MrBeast or – *shudder* – Logan Paul would approve their videos looking like how they do here), but when it all suddenly just descends into them doing a bunch of flips and bike stunts, all shot on GoPros of course, any sense of satire or Guy Ritchie-esque self-awareness goes out the window. Left behind is a bunch of smarmy and pandering nonsense that itself gives way to rapid tonal shifts where, again, we’re supposed to feel something just because they play a moody Billie Eilish song on the soundtrack.

There are also just many inconsistencies in the plotting of this movie that you find yourself thinking about throughout, making the heavily convenient ways in which Bianculli’s script unfolds all the more frustrating. It’s established that despite recording pretty much everything, including the areas surrounding their hideout, this gang has somehow evaded capture using the unique software that Kravitz’s character has created… but all it takes in the end is a keen pair of eyes to spot something that eventually leads the authorities straight to them, which probably would have happened a lot sooner if this wasn’t a movie. Characters will also be far too reckless in situations that could have been solved so much simpler and with significantly less bloodshed, while others are sidelined so hard that it’s almost insulting to the actors playing them (Anna Sawai, an Emmy-winning standout in Shōgun, is reduced to a role that can be best described as “girlfriend”), all as the closing shots indicate that no lessons have been learned, and that there is frightfully more to come.

Thankfully, How to Rob a Bank doesn’t seem to be tracking well at the box office or with other critics, so it seems this is very much a one-off. However, even as a singular entity it manages to annoy and frustrate with its smug, obnoxious superiority that no self-respecting criminal would want to steal.

SO, TO SUM UP…

How to Rob a Bank is an annoyingly obnoxious crime thriller that sees its undercooked script and overly flashy direction go no deeper than its surface-level anti-capitalist messaging.