How to Rob a Bank Review: TikTok Marxism

Films about social media rarely feel authentic. For every Zola, there’s a dozen or more Sprees. That high-octane subversive action flick How to Rob a Bank feels like its online elements were really crafted with real-world software, and looks like it would find a real streaming audience, is a serious achievement.

It’s also one of the most politically timely films of the year, a rage-fueled act of revenge against the American economic system that breaks us down and keeps us all in shackles.

So why does it all feel so infuriatingly superficial?

How to Rob a Bank is the name of the film but also a hashtag marking the massive online success of the Wolf (Nicholas Hoult) and his crew of bank robbers in Pittsburgh. The series is exactly what it says it is: a how-to guide to knocking off banks and getting away with it. But it’s not all cash withdrawals and cutting alarms. The Wolf is a modern Robin Hood with a follower count instead of a band of merry men, educating viewers not only on how to empty the drawers at their local financial institution but also why it’s a necessary act of rebellion.

As directed with typical gusto by David Leitch (John Wick, The Fall Guy, Bullet Train), the end result feels like Fortnite Fight Club Season, a hyperstylized all-action political diatribe that has enough substance to be tantalizing and infuriating at the same time. As Hoult delivers his lectures to camera from beneath his wolf mask, How to Rob a Bank lays out its very sensible political fury so clearly that it feels a little facile. Every time that burned-out FBI Special Agent West (John C. Reilly) lays out one of the obvious points against the Wolf’s campaign against the financial sector (for example, that unleashing a horde of armed wannabe bank robbers/political revolutionaries on the streets may not have the desired consequences), it feels like scriptwriter Mark Bianculli is ticking a box rather than examining the issues he raises.

How to Rob a Bank undoubtedly succeeds as rabble-rousing entertainment, but it’s also glib, and never really capable of getting beyond its TikTok Marxism. It’s thrilling and unexpected that a major studio like Amazon MGM would bankroll a film with such a clear anti-capitalist message. Yet in its quest to show everyone – from families buried in medical debt to abandoned veterans and even the cops protecting a system that sees them as disposable – it places all the evils of the world on the shoulders of Christian Slater as a cartoon villain banker.

His is not the only character that feels superficial. Hoult is just furious, with little light and shade to the man behind the Wolf’s mask or any real clue as to how he got so good at robbing banks in the first place. As for his political awakening, that seems to be “read Saul Alinsky once in college.”

Meanwhile, Reilly bafflingly seems to have been dumped in a bag of white stage powder before arriving on set, like he thought he was playing Marley in an amateur production of A Christmas Carol. White is established as the cop we’re supposed to like. Instead, he’s laden down with so many devil’s advocate dialogue scenes that the tension we’re supposed to feel between him and the Wolf is never really ratcheted up. As for Zoë Kravitz as the white hat hacker who West takes on as his partner of sorts, her nerd credentials are established by her eating garbage snacks and never washing her hair. If that’s not insulting enough, once she delivers a piece of MacGuffin software to the FBI in the first hour she never really has anything to do. The only really rounded character is Vince, the Afghanistan vet poisoned by burn barrels, played with an aura of despair by Pete Davidson.

It’s that lack of depth that curtails the impact of How to Rob a Bank. Bianculli and Leitch have grand ambitions, but there’s a superficiality that’s oddly summed up by the moments in which the escaping stick-up gang commit acts of random parkour or extreme dirt biking. It’s so clearly a masked stunt performer doing something the character would never do, shown because it looks cool and not because it adds anything to the film. It’s the same problem with the Wolf: The script just Frankensteins the character together with parts purloined from Tyler Durden and Clive Owen’s crook-on-a-mission from Inside Man, leaving Hoult to float the part on charisma alone. There are just too many info dumps, conceptual contradictions, and blind alleys in the story, leading to the inevitable “one last big job” that feels like it will end up as a “this is the future Democrats want” meme on Fox News.

How to Rob a Bank means well, but in its empty fist-pumping it feels like someone bought the movie rights to a dirtbag left podcast. That’s a tragedy when such a smart and pertinent idea deserves so much more thought.

How to Rob a Bank

2026, R, 122 min. Directed by David Leitch. Starring Nicholas Hoult, John C. Reilly, Zoë Kravitz, Pete Davidson, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Christian Slater.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

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