How to Rob a Bank Is Amazon's Anti-Capitalism Film, Funded by Amazon

David Leitch's heist-meets-activism caper has the right targets and wrong everything else. Flat where it should burn, dated where it should crackle, and complicit where it should rage.

David Leitch has built a career on kinetic, loud, expensive action films — Deadpool 2, Bullet Train, Hobbs & Shaw — that mistake velocity for energy. How to Rob a Bank is his attempt at something more grounded, more politically pointed, and more emotionally engaged. The attempt is sincere enough to notice. The execution is not. The premise is genuinely good: a masked collective pulls off bank heists, livestreams tutorials so followers can replicate them, and donates proceeds to local charities. It's Robin Hood meets influencer culture, and in 2026 that should land like a brick through a bank window. Instead it lands like a press release. The team — Ryan (Nicholas Hoult, visibly bored), Emi (Anna Sawai, criminally underused), Vince (Pete Davidson), and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) — are defined by their grievances (healthcare costs, immigration enforcement, predatory banking) but never by their personalities. We're told they're angry; we never feel it. The digital-activism layer is the film's most embarrassing failure. The crew's viral content looks like it was designed by someone who last went online in 2014 — a lolcat aesthetic the review accurately calls 'passé a decade ago.' This matters enormously because the film's entire argument depends on the robbers feeling genuinely contemporary, genuinely dangerous, genuinely of this internet moment. They don't. The summer of 2026 delivered actual gen Z filmmakers making work that felt authentically networked; How to Rob a Bank feels like a boomer's mood board of What Kids Are Into. Zoë Kravitz gets the worst of it. Her character — a house-arrested hacker with a Cheeto in her hair, an inexplicable snacking habit, and a chatbot for a conscience — is a CBS procedural sketch pasted into a film that wants to be taken seriously. The comparison to her Kimi character is apt and damning: that film gave her specificity and menace; this one gives her quirks in lieu of character. John C Reilly's burned-out FBI agent is marginally more interesting, until the script hands him a monologue about how we should actually be feeling sorry for the police — the non-racist ones, specifically — which is a remarkable note to strike in a film ostensibly about systemic financial exploitation. The political problem is structural, not incidental. This is an anti-capitalism film produced by Amazon, featuring multiple scenes of Mountain Dew product placement. That contradiction is not just funny — it's fatal. The film cannot commit to its own anger because its financier is one of the institutions the film is nominally angry at. The result is what the review nails as 'an Occupy Wall Street bumper sticker on an SUV': the aesthetic of dissent without the cost of it. Set It Off (1996) — explicitly name-checked when screenwriter Mark Bianculli lifts a shootout death from it — understood that heist films about desperate people work because we fear for and believe in those people. How to Rob a Bank gives us characters who exist to illustrate a thesis, and the thesis isn't even sharp. At just over two hours, the film outstays its welcome by about forty minutes. The heist sequences are, per the review, 'smugly framed yet dimly thought through.' There is no mounting dread, no genuine attachment, no moment where the stakes feel real. When the climactic heist arrives and 'masked anarchy grips the streets of Pittsburgh,' the most honest response is indifference. Films about fighting the system need to make you feel the weight of the system first. This one assumes you already do, and coasts on that assumption for its entire runtime.