“You know what’s more powerful than a gun? An audience.”
How to Rob a Bank is a poorly paced heist picture with a very overt political bent, and while not precisely preachy, the film is positively packed with social-commentary proselytizing. It tells the story of a brazen bank robbery crew and the FBI team dedicated to stopping their crime spree. How to Rob a Bank feels like a mashup of Roger Avery’s 1994 heist film, Killing Zoe and the David Fincher-directed 1999 classic cautionary tale about cults, Fight Club, albeit updated for the TikTok crowd. The Big Bad Wolf wants to change society and needs to have a huge following to achieve his goals, just like Tyler Durden, but for very different reasons. When How to Rob a Bank works, it works great. Its action beats are flashy, frenetic, and full of kinetic energy. When it doesn’t, the story drags.
“Are these kids criminals? Yes, but they’re also canaries in the coal-mine.”
How to Rob a Bank is a 2026 Imagine Entertainment/ 87North Productions film distributed by Amazon MGM. The picture is directed by David Leitch from a story by Mark Bianculli and stars Nicholas Hoult, Zöe Kravitz, John C. Reilly, Ana Sawai, Pete Davidson, Alessandra Frugoli, Tati Gabrielle, Christian Slater and Rhenzy Feliz.
“Is it worth it to get in our way? You are a rounding error to them. No one will stop you from taking a few crumbs, so who is hungry?”
The Big, Bad Wolf is Ryan (Hoult). He is the leader of a highly skilled, Pittsburgh-based bank-robbing squad consisting of his Vince (Davidson), his muscle, a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, his tech-guy Hugo (Feliz), and their driver, Emi (Sawai), who is also Ryan’s girlfriend. With the rallying cry of “Let’s make some content!”, they knock over small bank branches after diverting the majority of emergency responders with calls to the bomb squad that can’t be ignored by 911 dispatchers. They also document their heists and post them to their YouTube channel entitled How to Rob a Bank. They’ve been at it for a bit; their videos regularly go viral. One of the keys to Team Wolf’s successes is that they cleverly use anti-RF fabric in their loot-bags to prevent dye-pack detonations. There are at least 12 confirmed copycat groups running amok and nationwide, and bank robberies are up 400% from the last quarter.
The FBI is involved, and Agent John West (Reilly) is given the assignment to take them down. To that end, he recruits Reagan Gardner (Kravitz), a hacker serving a home-arrest sentence because a program she built was used by a stalker to rape and murder an innocent woman without her knowledge. If she helps the FBI catch Team Wolf, her arrest goes away and she gets a clean slate.
Can Team Wolf build a viable social movement on the backs of bank robberies? How much of a face-turn has Gardner actually made? What will Ryan do if he succeeds? Can Agent West and the FBI stop this crime wave or will West be like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide? See How to Rob a Bank if you’d like to find out.
“It ends how we planned it, how we imagined it.”
“Did you imagine the death of your friend?”
How to Rob a Bank has superficial visual similarities to Watchdogs: Legion, a 2020 third-person video game by Ubisoft about data-thieves. There is a Point Break reference in a bad joke (in case no one notices the commonalities between the Big, Bad Wolf’s crew in How to Rob a Bank and the Ex-Presidents, the group of bank robbers from that 1991 film). The approach of Agent West’s retirement echoes that of Sgt. Roger Murtaugh in 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2. There’s a Golden Girls joke that died in the theatre like it jumped off the balcony head-first. Their Pittsburgh neighborhood gives off a distinct West Side Story vibe. Constant jabs at Kravitz’s pothead character become a running joke, and contact high references abound in her apartment during scenes that are curiously devoid of smoke.
The quick-cut robbery and instructional sequences are entertaining and brisk. The rest of the movie plods along at a much more tepid pace. Unfortunately, the car chases leave much to be desired. It would have been better had director Leitch indulged in watching or (re-watching) the Rowdy Herrington 1993 film, Striking Distance, starring Bruce Willis as a Pittsburgh cop trying to stop a serial killer. That film is full of nail-biter car chase scenes that admittedly take many liberties with the city’s road-grid geometry in service of increasing the tension of sequences and shots.
Most of the actors are perfectly adequate in their roles, but Pete Davidson stands out. He really nails his part as a bitter, burn-pit cancer sufferer with a magical relationship with his daughter Michaela, played by Alessandra Frugoli. Davidson is unexpectedly at the heart of every emotional moment that lands in the picture.
Like the identically garbed, shave-pated “Space Monkeys” of Project Mayhem, followers of and subscribers to How to Rob a Bank are encouraged to participate and join in the fun dressed exactly like the four-person crew. Team Wolf even has QR codes and sells their own merch. In another Fight Club parallel, during a critical riot scene, some of the participants can be seen with signs reading “I clean your office”, while many of the professional security personnel are portrayed in the film sympathizing with the Wolf and his crew, mirroring Tyler’s “We guard you while you sleep; do not fuck with us” speech when Project Mayhem threatens the Police Commissioner.
Visually, even at night, there are no real heavy shadows. Everything is very flatly lit. The “real life” sequences are shot in 35mm while the group’s viral online instructional videos are crisply shot in digital. Periodically, artificial texture is added to the film, overlaid alongside faux cigarette burns (in another possible Fight Club connection) marking reel transitions that don’t exist.
There are some genuinely odd aspects of How to Rob a Bank. How does Team Wolf keep their videos online without them being deleted? They’re explicitly using YouTube. Their videos are everywhere. It is never made clear why the FBI can’t get them just yoinked from the interwebs. Another part of the plot that makes no sense whatsoever from a story standpoint is how the filmmakers handle the final heist. The FBI knows what the last target is on the list. They’ve made contact with the branch manager, they’ve got Team Wolf’s plan largely sussed out but don’t have men inside the bank, and they run their stake-out on a shoestring, leaving the target exposed. Why? Because the film doesn’t want to be 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon and needs a positive climax, not a buzzkill conclusion (which informs how the entirety of the extended ending works out).
Some of the “quirky hacker” traits they give Kravitz’s character are baffling. For example, at her apartment, she works with her head inches away from an overly bright, bare bulb in a lamp missing its shade. She gets weed delivered on the regular. This reviewer is pretty sure they ship lampshades in the mail. The government doesn’t need her social-media scouring algorithm, FYPOS (Fuck You, Piece of Shit, a program that scours social media sites, hunting for commonalities in posted images), they already have it. It would’ve been entered into evidence during her trial. They could’ve just had her character working as a white-hat hacker for the FBI instead of having to be coerced into joining the hunt for the Big, Bad Wolf.
How to Rob a Bank’s inconsistent pacing is an issue. The fact that the film wants the audience to relate to BOTH Team Wolf and Team West is problematic. Team Wolf are the protagonists. They are breaking the laws of what they see as an unjust system, while West is just trying to do his job and prevent anarchy and what he sees as the collapse of civilization. The film can’t decide what side it wants to come down on even though the movie is called How to Rob a Bank, not How to Rob a Bank or Fight Crime with the FBI. This reviewer would save How to Rob a Bank for streaming.
How to Rob a Bank is in theatres 11/13/2026.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher