fundamentally flawed plot, unbelievable characters, major moral blind-spots = bad movie

Rating: 1/10 (5 October 2009)

This review is full of SPOILERS and is meant for those who've seen this film.
1. Major plot flaw. The police would have identified the "painters" almost immediately, and this is hidden from the audience by the way in which the interrogation scenes are handled.
The criminals' strategy for escape was to blend in with the other hostages and be unidentifiable. The video surveillance cameras were disabled only 2 minutes before the "painters" entered. By checking the videos the police would see what customers had entered the bank before then and could rule them out as "painters." The police could also rule-out all employees, not only because employees would be on tape, but even if not, the employees would know who of their number was in the bank at the time they were seized.
This means that the "painters" could only be customers, and could only be among those customers who walked in during the two minutes between disabling the cameras and the entry of the "painters." Look at the number of customers already in the bank before the cameras went out -- a lot. Not many came in during those 2 minutes, even if some left during those 2 minutes. At most, let's say that 12 people came in during those 2 minutes, including the "painters."
Then get physical descriptions of the "painters'" height, weight, sex, etc., from all the hostages. Compare those with the physical details of the 12 people. Of the 12 people, how many match each description? If one, the police have spotted a "painter" already. If 2 or 3 or 4, the police have a very small number of people to investigate further to expose which of that small group is a "painter."
Moreover, every customer has to have a reason for being there: either to deal with an existing account, or open a new one. But a person opening a new account would go to an employee to start the process. So the "painters" each had to have already established an individual account with that bank. When did those 12 people open their accounts? The police would look at the time each of the 12 first opened an account. More recent accounts, opened at about the same date, would indicate who the "painters" might be.
Now, why were each of the 12 at that downtown branch at that time, as opposed to a different branch or a different time? It must be, either they work nearby, or live nearby, or are running an errand where the route includes that branch.
What friend or relative saw them in person before they left to go to the branch? How did they get to the branch -- walking, or subway, or taxi? How were they planning to get to their next destination? Where did they plan to go after their errand at the branch was finished? Who was expecting to see them at that place? Did anyone who was expecting to see them later that day wonder what had happened to them, or call the police to ask whether they were among the hostages?
Recently opened accounts, near the date of other accounts, by people who neither live nor work near that branch, or have a plausible errand, who can't tell a plausible tale of how they got there or where they planned to go next, or who was expecting them: these are the prime suspects for "painters."
The police very swiftly will have a very good idea who the "painters" are. Investigate them in detail and they are exposed; then pressure them to reveal the identities of the other criminals.
This is what real police would do, but the movie, by showing the police pursuing a different, useless approach, leads the audience to think the "painter" masquerade would work. This movie operates on the old principle "the criminal plot looks brilliant because the police are made to act like idiots yet look intelligent."
2. Major moral blindness. 50 innocent citizens are terrorized, held hostage, assaulted, battered, for a day, a very significant crime, and yet at the end we are told that because nothing was stolen from the bank, the government and the police are just going to drop the whole affair. But what the criminals did to those people was a far more serious crime than any theft of bank property would have been. This movie passes-off that crime as if it were nothing, nothing at all. The terrorized hostages are pushed off the stage like so many plastic dolls who've served their role in the filmmakers' story. But those characters are human beings. The criminals, supposedly motivated by an idealistic desire to act against a Nazi profiteer, commit a horrific moral injustice on innocent people, whose rights and dignity they are blind to, in the pursuit of their own moral mission. This is a profound moral flaw in this film. The criminals are narcissists, so focused on their own desire for justice in their cause that they are blind to the injustice they inflict on others as they pursue their mission.
3. Unbelievable characters. A billionaire bank president anguished over his past exploitation of the Holocaust, but who is trying to hide his past, by hiring a real estate agent who has a side-line as a high-level "fixer" of rich people's problems, who is herself disgusted by his pro-Nazi past, yet takes his pay-off check anyway, and whose only attempt to "fix" the problem is a short and ineffective conversation with the criminal master-mind? A supposedly smart and honorable police hostage negotiator who is also the chief interrogator of the suspects, and who takes a diamond pay-off from the mastermind with a laugh, and who is completely blind to the serious crime of terrorism and hostage-taking of 50 civilians? None of these characters is believable.