'Bandit' Review: A Paint-By-Number Caper Using Only Primary Colors
According to this film, Gilbert Galvan Jr. held (maybe even still holds) a record for robbing more than fifty banks consecutively in just a few years across Canada. He did this through a modus operandi which included disguises, flying across the country between jobs, and confidently revisiting banks which he’d just held up. His story sounds like it could have made for a heck of a film, but unfortunately it got this one instead.
One would have to do some research on the real life individual to know how much of this film’s content actually happened, but assuming that it’s accurate, then the man lived a life full of movie tropes. No stone is left unturned. We have the banter between a driven cop and a cocky criminal. There’s a meet-cute moment when the main character knocks on a door, which only opens after he turns to walk away dejected. Cue a scene where she resists his natural charm, but only just barely. Cue the scene where they go out and he lies to her about his past. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the moment when she discovers the truth about his lies. And who can forget the crying kid while someone gets arrested in slow-motion? Not to mention a robber counting down from three - purely for the audience watching the film - just before he effortlessly escapes a crime scene.
Occasionally, the film will helpfully point out when something ludicrous actually happened in real life. Other times, the main character gives smarmy narration, and at one point even mugs for the camera. Sadly, what works in The Big Short just feels like a confusion over tone with this project. It’s definitely trying to make some kind of overarching point, though. The film is set during the mid-1980s, and it comments on the economic woes of the average joe while Ronald Reagan drones away on the televisions. It even makes use of that classic 80s track “Oh Yeah” by Yello (and even in that song’s ludicrous history, this film features probably the most random insert of that song so far). Gilbert is a fugitive in Canada, trying to make an honest living, only to discover that he’s got a gift for robbing banks. There is definitely a story here, especially considering that Galvan Jr’s life has already inspired a book and an episode of Masterminds. Something must have gotten lost in the translation.
If one were to sum up Bandit in a single word, it would be ‘constrained.’ In between those rare flourishes (which were presumably the parts of the story which actually happened) the film’s script is limited by a lack of imagination and an inability to breathe life into old ideas. Also, for a film that’s about a high-flying bank robber, the film feels hampered for whatever reason. Consider the fact that the crime boss Tommy Kay (Mel Gibson) spends about 90% of his scenes in the same strip club with the same three lackeys hanging out. Moreover, there’s a sequence where the main character flies around, only for the two main cop characters to follow him in a helicopter. Apparently the Pembroke and London airports look eerily similar. It would also be possible to make a drinking game out of how many times we see a sweeping drone shot of Vancouver and Ottawa. But even discounting those limitations, the story is threadbare. There’s some sort of a rivalry between Galvan and a side character, but it’s barely justified and only exists for a single payoff scene. One of the characters also has a teenage daughter whose existence is so arbitrary and pointless that even her actress looks confused.
Credit to Josh Duhamel, though. He’s doing as much as he can with this material. He makes some of the bank robbery scenes work through the sheer charisma of his own performance. There’s a scene where he tries to make a frowning policeman crack a smile with a joke, and I’ll be honest, I laughed along with the cop. Whatever the film demands him to do (be funny, be coolly professional, be earnestly heartfelt), Duhamel gamely endures. Beside him, Gibson has so little to do and does so little with his character that it’s like he wandered onto the set as a favour to an old high school friend. Nestor Carbonell portrays the primary cop on the bank robber’s case, and the most positive thing to say about him and his performance is that at least he’s not stuck on exposition duty like Swen Temmel. Saddest of all is Elisha Cuthbert. Like Duhamel, she’s working to sell her performance come hell or high water. Unfortunately, she is stuck with a character that’s basically an amalgam of every cliched “wife to a criminal” that you’ve seen. She’s shocked at the secret, she’s excited that he’s robbing banks, she’s urging him to give it up and go straight for the sake of their life together… she really deserved better material than this.
All in all, Bandit is as bland as its title, and so recycled that the film production probably had a negative carbon footprint. The worst part is it didn’t have to be this boring, and it didn’t have to waste the cast which it had.