Collider·United States·Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 06:40 PM UTC

'How to Rob a Bank' Takes the Fun Out of Crime | Review

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Gabrielle Moss

Published Nov 12, 2026, 1:40 PM EST

Gabrielle Moss has been writing about pop culture for over a decade, for publications including The New Yorker, GQ.com, Slate, Bustle, New York Magazine, and many more. Her book,
"Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction," was released in 2018, and she was featured in the 2023 documentary "Judy Blume Forever."

If there's ever been a moment to release movies about heroes who rob from the rich and give to the poor, it's now. It's not just that we're living in an era of monumental wealth inequality; it's also a time when playing by the rules has largely been framed as old-fashioned, something that will only keep you from surviving in an increasingly rigged system. It's an atmosphere that naturally lends itself to the sort of juicy philosophical questions that have fueled great outlaw films from Bonnie and Clyde to Point Break to Fight Club: who decides what makes a crime a crime, and a criminal a criminal? What are your moral obligations when you're fighting corporate forces that would happily ruin your entire life to save $100? And what happens when you eventually go too far?

How to Rob a Bank, David Leitch's new action-comedy about a modern-day Robin Hood (Nicholas Hoult) who, along with his band of GoPro-toting Merry Men, knocks off banks, gives the money to charity, and then makes anti-capitalist YouTube videos about it, was obviously conceived with all that in mind. But the shallow end product shies away from any morally messy territory, giving us the most upstanding batch of bank robbers in recent memory. Too scared to place its heroes in any gray areas, How to Rob a Bank sets us up to cheer for its squeaky-clean criminals as they engage in some DIY wealth redistribution — but it's also too timid to make the FBI agents hunting the gang into villains, creating an "Oops! All Good Guys!" scenario with almost no tension.

All of this might not matter if the film leaned hard on the action and comedy chops that have helped Leitch carve out a compelling Hollywood niche over the past decade. After getting his start producing (and co-directing) the first John Wick film, the stunt-performer-turned-filmmaker has helmed almost every kind of action picture and crafted some real standouts along the way, including Charlize Theron's moody Cold War action thriller Atomic Blonde and Brad Pitt's hyper-stylized action-comedy Bullet Train.

But despite a profusion of neon colors, fast cuts, and, y'know, bank robberies, How to Rob a Bank is surprisingly tedious. With a mix of barely-sketched characters, unengaging plotting and inert dialogue — paired with a puzzling lack of the gorgeously choreographed action scenes that Leitch is known for — How to Rob a Bank somehow takes all the fun out of crime.

What Is 'How to Rob a Bank' About?

Ryan (Hoult) is a type of person who could only exist in 2026: a bank robber with a Machine Gun Kelly hairdo who's more concerned with his viewer count than his money. Along with his friends Vince (Pete Davidson) and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz), and his love, Emi (Anna Sawai), Ryan dons animal masks and robs banks all over Pittsburgh, as the leader of the "Who's Hungry?" gang. But the important part comes later, when the group edits together footage from their heists into YouTube videos that educate their loyal fanbase about how an economy run by uncaring corporate overlords has left average schmucks like them royally screwed, with few opportunities for advancement . . . except robbing their own banks.

Of course, many people in law enforcement are not thrilled by the gang's messaging, including FBI agent John West (John C. Reilly), who's sympathetic to their talk about economic struggles, but thinks anarchy might be better in theory than in practice. Since the Bureau isn't equipped to track down these tech-wise millennials, he recruits Reagan Gardner (Zoe Kravitz), a junk food-addicted slacker/ computer science genius currently under house arrest after a program she created to track down an ex-boyfriend was used in a federal crime. West will free her if she agrees to help him track down Who's Hungry — even though Reagan, like almost everyone in this film who isn't a cop or an evil millionaire, is thoroughly enchanted by the gang's antics.

A shocking mid-film pivot takes things into more serious territory, abandoning the initially irreverent tone for something more dour as the gang head towards their biggest score yet, and the FBI work overtime to stop them — a task that becomes much more complicated when the public, radicalized by Who's Hungry's videos, show up to support them.

'How to Rob a Bank's Criminals Are Too Good To Be Engrossing

Whether you're watching dead-serious fare like The Godfather or a comedy caper like Snatch, the pleasure of crime movies lies largely in being seduced by their morally ambiguous protagonists. But How to Rob a Bank largely skips over this. Despite a few moments in which FBI agent West shouts out the value of law and order, we're largely told that Who's Hungry are on the right side — sometimes literally, as in a man-on-the-street bit where seemingly every single person in Pittsburgh is revealed to love these adorable bank robbers. If their public support and anti-capitalist rhetoric aren't enough for you, the members of the gang are also driven by incredibly tragic backstories that renders all moral debate moot: these are the heroes.

But the film paints that goodness in incredibly broad strokes; we spend minimal time with the gang's members when they're not masked up and waving around machine guns (filled with blanks, as the film emphasizes more than once), meaning they never become anything more than vague outlines of characters. Most of our knowledge of who these people are and what drives them comes via their glossy, highly produced, and thoroughly cringe-inducing YouTube videos, which instruct viewers on economic inequality talking points and the finer points of bank robbery. These videos are shown in their entirety several times throughout the film, but don't contribute much except making you wonder how exactly these college improv group-style skits gained them millions of followers.

Far more fleshed out and ambiguous is Kravitz's Reagan, who has actually committed a selfish crime, and is also the most compelling character in the film. Though she's not given much to work with, Kravitz charms as Reilly's unlikely second-in-command, even if she's rehashing about three different characters she's played in the past. At certain times, it seems like Reagan's emerging mentorship with Agent West might be the film's focus — they're given time to chit-chat and idly talk about their life philosophies in a way that no member of Who's Hungry is. Reilly's West plays it surprisingly straight; he feels like a slightly odd choice to be the face of good-hearted traditional authority, but he's able to keep up as Kravitz's straight man.

However, the film pivots away from Reagan and West's story midway through, with a sudden tonal shift that changes the viewing experience into something far more severe. It's not to say that an ostensible comedy can't deal in serious issues, but after this plot twist, How to Rob a Bank becomes a far more serious movie, suddenly dealing in grief and other heavy emotions that the first half didn't touch.

The film's most shocking twist, however, is the way it almost entirely abandons the balletic fight choreography that Leitch is known for. A quick fight scene in a moving truck and a brief confrontation with a security guard offer some John Wick-ian thrills, and a chase involving an armored car serves as a fun mid-film centerpiece, but the action is kept to a minimum overall. Most of the gang's robberies proceed totally unimpeded, and when Who's Hungry decide to engage in some actual violence later in the film, there's little cat-and-mouse aspect to it; their enemies are dispatched quickly so we can get to the film's hurried ending that much faster.

'How to Rob a Bank' Doesn't Have the Juice

HOW-TO-ROB-A-BANK-Anna-Sawai-Nicholas-Hoult

One of the most overquoted lines in crime film history is Tom Sizemore's declaration to Robert DeNiro in Heat that "For me, the action is the juice." But it's impossible to watch How to Rob a Bank and not wonder about the juice motivating Who's Hungry. Given that plenty of average Americans suffer tragedies that somehow don't transform them into media-savvy bank robbers, how exactly do a group of normal people become Point Break-style adrenaline-junkie criminals? There's an interesting film in that answer. But this one isn't it.

How to Rob a Bank certainly has its heart in the right place, and is probably the biggest film since Parasite to probe the failings of modern capitalism. But its big-hearted politics alone aren't enough. In the end, How to Rob a Bank feels like actually going through all the trouble of robbing a bank, only to find out that the vault had been empty the entire time.