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.

As a British ex-pat, I am always keen to watch British movies, especially the crime/bank job/gang genre. However, I was very disappointed by this very slow-moving, cliché-ridden attempt...it was like watching a bad episode of The Bill (or maybe Eastenders, given that it had Shaun Williamson and Paul Nicholls in it!).

The story was dull, the casting poor, the acting wooden - even Geoff Bell seemed like he was just going through the motions without putting in much of an effort. Maybe I have become too accustomed to watching better and more natural 'bad boys' like Jason Statham, Colin Farrell, and even Danny Dyer in such roles.

*Big yawn - don't bother watching*

I would think that this film has been overshadowed probably due to The Bank Job being released only a couple of months previous. There's a bunch of familiar faces from films such as Lock Stock, Snatch, The Business etc and even a bloke from Eastenders. Your usual cockney lot.

That being said the acting is spot on and the dialogue is funny. Gotta love low budget British films, there's a hell of a lot more of them recently and its a welcome change to the usual big budget yankee tosh.

The characters are fun but believable, especially the young white kid really made me laugh. What made him so funny was the fact that I know kids just like him haha.

The rest of the crims were your usual hard cases, jokers and sarcastic cockney types.

Overall the storyline and dialogue was very well written and an enjoyable film throughout.

I give it 8/10 to try and make up for whichever tosspot gave it such a crap rating. Bravo.

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.