None of the half-dozen movies David Leitch has made since branching off from his unofficial co-direction of the original John Wick have topped that now-classic action franchise. (His Atomic Blonde comes closest, though obviously without three eye-popping ante-escalating sequels.) But while his name has become shorthand in some corners for a certain kind of glibly soulless Hollywood blockbuster, Leitch’s flirtations with anonymity could be recast, in a certain light, as an impressive range of action-movie interests. In addition to the hard-R, neon-soaked Atomic Blonde, he’s engaged with the cartoonier corners of the Fast & Furious universe, played the gory meta games of Deadpool 2, thrown back to snarky ’00s post-Tarantino action comedies via Bullet Train, composed a genuinely romantic mash note to the genre in the form of action rom-com The Fall Guy, and now tackles a heist-driven action thriller with How To Rob A Bank.
These movies do exist on a spectrum, of course—in both style and overall quality—so it would be reasonable to expect How To Rob A Bank to land somewhere more arch than The Fall Guy but not quite as disaffected as Bullet Train. Instead, How To Rob A Bank sometimes threatens to zip past the action genre entirely. It still has just enough in way of chases, scuffles, and squealing tires to qualify, but Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), the leader of a quartet of bank robbers and the perpetually masked star of their hit YouTube channel, isn’t really aiming for physical confrontation. The “How To Rob A Bank” channel has gained popularity—“viral” popularity, as the movie reminds us at least four times—through its frenetic, digitally enhanced, meme-conversant instructional videos, giving the audience real-deal pointers about how to take down scores and get away with it. (In truth, the sheer assemblage of footage in these videos owes as much to MTV in its death throes as contemporary YouTube.) They justify their actions by pointing to the greed and wealth disparities endemic in the banking industry, along with the health insurance industry, the workforce, and the whole rigged American capitalist system.
The movie joins Ryan, his main squeeze Emi (Anna Sawai), tech specialist Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz), and weapons expert Vince (Pete Davidson) already having knocked over a series of banks in the Pittsburgh area without anyone figuring out their identities as their follower count skyrockets. West (John C. Reilly), a frustrated FBI agent, recruits Reagan (Zoë Kravitz), an unkempt software engineer under house arrest for her creation of illegal tracking software, to use her program and overall know-how to help locate the perpetrators in exchange for her freedom. (She’s basically Angela Childs, Kravitz’s character from Kimi, with a legal block on leaving her apartment rather than a psychological one.)
How To Rob A Bank attempts to balance those two perspectives: the robbers as they execute a mysteriously popularity-dependent mission (with annotations provided by excerpts from their videos), and the mismatched partners endeavoring to stop them (reluctantly, in Reagan’s case). Because the screenplay by Mark Bianculli wants to withhold the crew’s full plan and motivations for dramatic effect, the story naturally drifts over to Reilly and Kravitz, who the movie can follow without giving anything away. The actors make some nice buddy chemistry out of conceits variously hack-writerly and actorly: Reilly plays a basically good man who believes, perhaps overmuch, in the system, while Kravitz has recently graduated from the Brad Pitt school of snack-acting (and, like Pitt, maintains a confusingly svelte figure as a character who supposedly lives on Hot Cheetos, Oreos, and food-truck dumplings).
Around the midway point, the reasons behind the bandits’ rhetoric emerge. Delaying this revelation creates some redundancy; their more generic rationale is plenty convincing, and the specific details are only surprising insofar as the movie becomes substantially grimmer than Leitch’s other solo romps. Moreover, while it’s mildly cathartic to see a movie go all-in on class warfare—despite Reilly’s reasonable nature and even an asterisk of sympathy for non-racist cops, How To Rob A Bank is essentially pro-robbery—this isn’t exactly Heat meets Parasite in terms of rigor, insight, or excitement. It whipsaws, sometimes uncomfortably, between two decidedly different movies. In one, our heroes are donning disguises, engaging in close-shave car chases, and mischievously flummoxing their straight-arrow pursuers. In the other, they’re lamenting their tragic backstories and embarking on desperate last-ditch efforts to make their mark on this ruined world.
Like any given pair of Leitch’s projects, those two modes (plus the more laid-back cop/hacker team) aren’t miles apart from compatibility. A stronger throughline of action might have been the unifying factor; reconciling tones through more dramatic means isn’t really Leitch’s forte. He leaves a lot to the actors here, and several of them are squeezed out as if operating within a much larger crew—particularly Sawai, who has to make do with simply getting the best disguises. How To Rob A Bank seems torn between offering a feel-good underdog story or a sobering call to action, the latter of which may be a bit lofty for an Amazon-funded project. For the moment, Leitch’s versatility has gotten the better of him.
Director: David Leitch
Writer: Mark Bianculli
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, John C. Reilly, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Pete Davidson
Release Date: November 13, 2026
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