This Eat the Rich Heist Film Will Make You Sick

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Eat the rich fantasies don’t come more unappetizing than How to Rob a Bank (Nov. 13, in theaters), an antifa-themed screed of a heist thriller whose simplistic inanity is only…

Eat the rich fantasies don’t come more unappetizing than How to Rob a Bank (Nov. 13, in theaters), an antifa-themed screed of a heist thriller whose simplistic inanity is only outdone by its abject corniness.

Matching the extremeness of any conservative-oriented contemporary entertainment (such as Prime Video’s rah-rah hit The Terminal List), David Leitch’s latest is as obnoxious as his prior The Fall Guy was charming. And the fact that it prioritizes its left-wing ideology over genre demands renders it borderline interminable. It’s a film for fans of Luigi Mangione, teens who get their politics from TikTok, and moviegoers who didn’t realize that Fight Club was a satire in which burn-it-down anarchy led not to happily-ever-after cultural revolution but apocalyptic fascism.

“It’s capitalism!” screams an evil banker to justify his predatory loans at the conclusion of How to Rob a Bank, thereby summing up the economic critique of Leitch and writer Mark Bianculli’s cinematic harangue. Their film attempts to rage against the machine from within the (Amazon/MGM) machine.

Yet even setting aside the hilarious hypocrisy of a wannabe blockbuster censuring the system that made its existence possible, what they concoct is a wholly tedious tirade that, instead of investigating the issues it raises, merely preaches to an uninformed choir with a mixture of self-satisfied vehemence, corner-cutting storytelling, and outright illogicality.

Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), a modern-day Robin Hood, has garnered 900 million views—a figure that’s repeated multiple times to hammer home its awesomeness—via a viral video series titled “How to Rob a Bank.” In it, he wears a wolf mask and depicts his crew’s real-world thievery while giving tutorials on how to get away with stealing and proffering noble rationalizations for taking from the rich.

His allies, he contends, are the working class, and the enemy is a United States that’s wracked with inequality and rigged in favor of the one percent.

As imagined…

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