Daylight Robbery

A solid British heist film which tries to capture the tension of Dog Day Afternnon.

Jeff Bell is good in the film as are the rest of the male cast. Good set-pieces - the tunnels sequences work very well. The bank job feels real enough. The film contains nice touches which take the audience in unexpected directions. It's good to see Barry from Eastenders doing something other than Extras. Not that many female characters, although the main woman is quite a babe.

Good tight piece all around. The kind of film that doesn't normally get made in UK. Paris Leonti is clearly a director to keep an eye on.

There is a fine tradition of British gangster and bank robbery films- this does not add to that tradition. Low budget can be good. Limited claustrophobic locations , good writing and fine acting can do an awful lot. Here they contribute nothing. There is a lot of shouting, a lot of swearing, no humour, no sense of character identity, just a whole load of characters that you want caught as soon as possible, not because you care, but because you want the film to end.

Director and writer Paris Leonti has nothing to say, the direction is laborious, the scenes derivative, the dialogue risible. Shaun Williamson is ludicrously miscast as the Policeman in charge of facing down the robbery. He makes no attempt whatsoever to give the role any character, he plays it as Fat Barry from East Enders, he can't be bothered, and that transmits itself to the audience.

The plot is hopeless, the stocking masks totally ineffective, the Police response wholly unbelievable. Some of the lines are off the scale of cringe worthy. Tiffany Mulheron offers some brief moments of respite as an attractive hostage, and that is about as good as it gets. Avoid at all costs. On no account pay money to see this . If it is available free of charge – do something else with your valuable time.

OK - firstly, why are all the 10* reviews from people with only one review? Secondly, to equate this to the Italian Job (Even the new version!) is a bloody insult.

It is just a basic stick-up job with lots of shouting and screams at the beginning, some ludicrous device about how to get money out of a City of London bank (Sure banks have with some 70 million have no motion detectors...) in the middle, and an OK third part where it all goes wrong.

It is just a mess, too chaotic; no or very little humour or charm, and after the first half-hour I had completely lost interest.

It is seems from the ground up a Let's Make A Lads Film - even down to the obligatory brunette as hostage - and I just ended up feeling that the writers sat around a table and said "Well lads, what would guys like in this?" "Right, football (There isn't any), hardnuts, big haul of cash, mockney accents, and hard attitudes, stupid cops etc;" and originality be damned.

If this is the best crime movie (It's not a heist movie - it's way too blatant to even get near that category) since the Italian Job - then we're all in the deepest poo...

NOT recommended Watch it when it comes on Sky, which it will forever...

It's a curious film because for some reason the tension never really takes off. One moment some customers are going about their routine, mundane business 'good morning sir, would you like that in tens or twentys?', 'tens please', 'certainly sir'. The next moment a mini-van smashes down the doors of the bank and masked men with guns shout at everyone to 'get the f*&@ down!'. And still the tension remains flat as a pancake.

The opportunities for conflict, and thus tension, abounds. The stakes are high: the lives of the hostages, the reputation of the police and the liberty of the robbers. You would expect all the parties concerned to be tense, very tense. Surprising then everyone seems remarkably laid back about the whole thing. The hostages do little more than huddle together in a corner with bags over their head, maybe the extras insisted on that. The police are passive rather than pro-active they observe wondering what will happen rather than figure out what to do next.

Operationally little of the story stands up. Why the British Transport Police would provide the incident control van and not the Metropolitan Police beats me. Can you really ram-raid a bank? Going into more detail means writing spoilers but I'm not into those. The planning of the job and its execution is so flawed that on a few occasions you wonder if the makers were actually trying to be funny. If they were, they failed. Badly.

This looks nothing like a group of slick professionals carrying a carefully planned robbery. Instead, it looks like a group of lads down the pub who were bored and decided to go rob a bank for a bit of a laugh. Except there are no laughs.

The acting is pretty flat, but what can you do with a script like this? The story lacks complexity so not much happens, it just plods on adding to the boredom. There is a hard deadline, albeit a ridiculous one, to meet, but the film gives no sense of it looming. The chief flaw is the interplay between the robbers. It lies in the no-man's land between a ragtag group on the verge of imploding and a top-notch team of solid professionals. Either option would be good but neither was selected. How they boring way they bounce off each other is mostly down to the flat dialogue. They're all good pals without a decent plan.

Daylight Robbery does has its moments, but they are few and far between.

Great! The opposite of what I thought it would be, and all the better for it! The presence of Vas Blackwood and the robbery theme made me think it might be the rumpled spawn of Lock, Stock, but don't let this throw you.

Daylight Robbery is a different beast altogether.

Instead of convoluted, contrived plot and cheap laughs, Leonti keeps it real and lets us go along for the ride with real, non sensational, believable characters.

A brave, distinctive movie about what it's probably really like to rob a bank.