Conflicited Opinion

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2020)

This film is a superb bank robbery film, it had me hooked in the first half. But then it dropped off a lot. This is genuinely one of the least climatic films I have seen. Christopher Plummer's character has a massive secret, one he can't tell anyone about, and you're hooked. You want to know why these guys are robbing a bank, you want to know why they're stalling. There are loads of interesting details scattered throughout. Denzel Washington's performance is top-notch - as per usual. But the second half of the film lags, overdrawing on things we already knew, and pulls in all the wrong directions. Sometimes you would rather it be an ambiguous ending, or at least have some mystery. Instead, we have a bit of a letdown on what was really in the safe, and that's it. I would've preferred for it to be like the business case in Pulp Fiction, where the contents are never implicitly stated. And Jodie Foster's character is just too convenient, she's never fleshed out well enough for the audience to take her seriously. Rather she's just the lady who 'knows people'. I was left wondering the entire time how she got to this massively high status. In all other aspects, it is great, it just could've used some tweaking.