'GTA 6' Meets 'Heat' in the Most Disappointing Heist Thriller of 2026

Published Nov 11, 2026, 12:00 PM EST GTA Online with a crisis of conscience How to Rob a Bank is a heist movie that can't quite hit the right score Image: Amazon MGM Studios Many a night, I find myself wondering: How does one rob a bank? It's a question Hollywood has been trying to answer for decades, from the meticulous clockwork of Michael Mann’s Heat to the pedal-to-the-metal chaos of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. The best heist films understand the robbery itself is just a vehicle for a much bigger story, whether that's the nature of obsession, loyalty, greed, or just a group of people willing to risk everything for one last score. Despite its playful name, How to Rob a Bank struggles to nail that delicate balance between heist thrills and deeper meaning. Instead, its promising setup gets bogged down by an uneven rhythm and a story that can’t decide whether it wants to be a serious crime drama or an unhinged digital farce. A heist movie for the content era Directed by David Leitch (Bullet Train, The Fall Guy), How to Rob a Bank taps directly into the visceral frustration with financial institutions, corporate greed, and the systemic squeeze of modern life. At the center of its story is ex-military-turned-bank-robber Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), who leads a small band of thieves including his wife Emi (Anna Sawai), military buddy Vince (Pete Davidson), and content mastermind Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) in brazen exploits posted to their YouTube channel, "How to Rob a Bank." As the film opens, they’re already fast on their way to becoming internet sensations, with Ryan donning a fox mask as he lectures viewers about class disparity and the mounting inefficiencies of the modern economy. Out to thwart them is Agent John West (John C. Reilly), who enlists the help of Reagan (Zoe Kravitz), a weed-loving, Cheeto-addicted programmer on house arrest. Image: Amazon MGM Studios There's an unmistakably anti-establishment theme running throughout the film, with banks portrayed as predatory institutions, while the gang's public robberies are framed as a form of populist rebellion. In one scene midway through the film, Agent West and Reagan meet with David Walton (Christian Slater), a particularly sleazy and arrogant bank manager who hand-waves away the rash of heists as the work of nothing more than common crooks. Reagan confronts him about the hypocrisy of it all, saying the quiet part out loud: Aren’t banks the real thieves? There's a genuine point being made about the ways financial institutions exploit the people they're supposed to serve. Are Ryan and his band of outlaws exploiting a broken system, or are they folk heroes giving something back to the working class? Image: Amazon MGM Studios It's an interesting question, particularly given how much of the movie revolves around the gang's growing online following. Their robberies aren't just about getting rich, but serve as performances carefully packaged for an audience that treats them like celebrities. The fox mask, the videos, and the increasingly audacious heists all contribute to a carefully constructed criminal persona. The movie even name-drops Point Break and Grand Theft Auto, making its influences and aspirations pretty clear. But there's something inherently strange about Leitch and screenwriter Mark Bianculli's decision to turn bank robberies into content. The gang's videos are treated as entertainment, with the characters aware that every successful robbery needs to be more outrageous than the last. There's a recurring insistence from Ryan that "it's not a game," yet practically everything around him suggests otherwise. The robberies become opportunities for jokes, spectacle, and viral moments, even when they're putting other people's lives in immediate danger. The comedy-thriller tug-of-war Image: Amazon MGM Studios Leitch has carved out a distinct niche in modern action cinema by treating high-speed chaos as a punchline and neon-soaked spectacle as his playground. From the breakneck pace of Bullet Train to the love letter to Hollywood stunt-work that is The Fall Guy, Leitch’s films often thrive on turning preposterous premises into self-aware crowd-pleasers. On paper, he feels tailor-made for a heist film with a modern edge, but where Leitch’s previous work leans fully into its cartoonish momentum, How to Rob a Bank gets caught in a jarring tug-of-war, trying its best to coast on the hyper-caffeinated energy of a GTA Online lobby while continually pumping the brakes to service heavy emotional trauma and systemic anti-capitalist grief. It leads to tonal whiplash where some of its most compelling dramatic beats are completely undermined by meme-ified irreverence. One sequence where the crew exchanges gunfire with an off-duty police officer is particularly illustrative of this problem. The confrontation is presented as part of the group's online content; yet another opportunity for laughs, with a fox mask-wearing Ryan announcing the arrival of a surprise cop like PewDiePie reacting to a video game jump scare. It's the sort of thing that might work in a broader comedy, but How to Rob a Bank also wants these encounters to carry genuine consequences. The crew is literally getting shot at, and yet the characters seem to exist in a world where everything can be brushed aside with another punchline. The film’s in-universe YouTube segments don't help. Meant to showcase how the crew packages its robberies for public consumption, they suffer from a glaring Hollywood sheen rather than resembling the off-the-cuff chaos and guerilla filmmaking approach of actual viral media. A more convincing found-footage approach for such sequences using actual GoPros or Insta360 cameras could have given those YouTube robbery sequences a less manufactured quality. Instead, we get Hollywood's idea of what a viral video should look like. Image: Amazon MGM Studios The tonal whiplash is most damaging when the film attempts to pivot into genuine tragedy. Later in the story, Vince faces a brutal reckoning, and Davidson handles the material with an unexpected vulnerability that gives the scene real emotional weight, but it ultimately doesn’t land with the full force it deserves. When a movie spends half of its runtime treating its characters' dangerous exploits as nothing more than internet comedy, suddenly asking the audience to absorb the devastating, life-or-death consequences of those actions feels disconnected from everything that came before. Those character-driven beats surface repeatedly in the film's latter half, feeling almost detached from the chaotic farce of the opening act. Whether it’s Vince’s unexpected vulnerability or the desperate loyalty binding Ryan and Emi together, Leitch genuinely wants us to care about these content-brained outlaws and the consequences of their actions, yet he rarely grants those moments enough room to breathe. It becomes nearly impossible to fully sink into the drama when the script keeps jerking the wheel back toward another viral joke. Playing dress-up in a GTA lobby Image: Amazon MGM Studios I wanted to like How to Rob a Bank considerably more than I did. There's a genuinely interesting movie somewhere in here, one that could have explored the strange relationship between internet celebrity, criminality, and the public's growing resentment toward financial institutions. The idea of an ex-military crew of bank robbers becoming folk heroes through viral videos is an entertaining premise, particularly in an era when online personalities can turn just about anything into a spectacle. But Leitch never quite finds the right approach. How to Rob a Bank would have benefited from leaning further into its comedic instincts. If it had embraced the absurdity of its premise, rather than repeatedly trying to inject serious emotional drama into the proceedings, it might have been a much more cohesive experience. I mean, why get John C. Reilly to play the pseudo-antagonist and not give him any of the funniest lines of the film? It’s baffling. Alternatively, playing it entirely straight could have given the anti-capitalist messaging and the moral tension between its characters considerably more weight, particularly the ideological divide between Agent West and Reagan. Image: Amazon MGM Studios Instead, How to Rob a Bank finds itself caught in an awkward middle ground, unwilling to fully commit to either half of its identity. Its characters constantly remind us that these heists aren't a game, yet the film itself can rarely refrain from treating them like one. It’s a disappointing outcome for a caper boasting this much talent, timely social commentary, and kinetic potential. Hoult delivers a fiercely committed performance, Reilly brings welcome dramatic gravitas, and the central conceit holds genuine promise, but there’s only so much mileage you can get out of an anti-capitalist revolution that feels like it was staged for clout. Still, given where the story leaves its outlaws, the door remains wide open for another round. If a follow-up is indeed on the horizon, one can only hope the inevitable How to Escape Prison figures out how to stick to a single frequency before breaking out. How to Rob a Bank releases in theaters on Nov. 13.