Nicholas Hoult Goes Blond For The Cause in 'How To Rob a Bank'

How important to you is Nicholas Hoult’s blond hair? That’s a question you should ask yourself right now, because if you’re like me and Nicholas Hoult’s blond hair is very important to you then you’ll probably have a perfectly fine time watching David Leitch’s perfectly adequate heist movie How To Rob a Bank. Nicholas Hoult has blond hair throughout the entire movie, and that’s just something I’m willing to stare at, in any context, for two hours of my life. I could be staring at the wall but instead I am staring at Nicholas Hoult’s blond hair, and hey—that is better than the wall.

David Leitch is a director who should probably be doing better than “the wall” at this point in his career, though—the man made the bisexual masterpiece Atomic Blonde for god’s sake. He also made, to comparatively lesser degrees of awesomeness, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy—films that starred Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling respectively. And I know what you’re all now thinking, as this literally begs the question: is David Leitch our most blond movie director? Something to ruminate on while I move on with this review.

How To Rob a Bank stars Blond Nicholas Hoult as a blond dude named Ryan who’s gotten so fed up with the system (dare one say The Man) that he’s not gonna take it, not gonna take it, anymore—he’s decided to line his blue eyes in some extremely flattering black makeup and slip on a wolf mask to rob banks for a living along with a gang of his friends. This makes sense to everyone in this movie because they all agree that the best movie is Kathyrn Bigelow’s bank-robbing surfer movie Point Break, which famously starred an extremely blond Patrick Swayze. (His co-star Keanu was not blond, except in spirit.)

Those friends of Ryan’s include his romantic partner Emi (Anna Sawai) and his two besties Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) and Vince (Pete Davidson)—none of these people are blond, and that’s how you know they’re not the star of this movie. Also the fact that they’re all playing cardboard thin characters with only one or two discernable traits to them—or three in the case of Vince, who is a war veteran dying of cancer with a little girl. Are those traits? Well they’re what he’s got anyway, besides that ineffable Peter-Davidson-ness, the stuff that if you bottled it would smell like Cool Ranch Doritos.

Ryan and his friends each have back-stories as thick as one whole dollar bill that give them their motivations for why they want to be out here robbing banks, but basically it comes down to one thing—don’t we all really want to rob banks? How To Rob a Bank fancies itself a popularist screed against late-stage capitalism a la Triangle of Sadness or The Menu (which also starred Hoult, but back in brunette simp mode) or hell even One Battle After Another (it wishes); Ryan’s gang posit themselves as Social Media Robin Hoods, posting a series of viral YouTube clips that present as training videos to the the masses huddled around their smartphones. “Sick of the man beating you down? Here are five easy steps to mass anarchy. Smash that like and share button!”

The film never really wrestles with the stupid violence this would unleash—the innocent people that would be terrorized and probably murdered by unleashing an army of enthusiastic YouTubers into the streets—not until it comes for one of their own gang anyway (and I bet you can guess which one based on the sheer number of their discernable traits). John C. Reilly is here for some reason as a nice guy cop who’s on the gang’s tail and one supposes represents the wan voice of reason, even as Reilly seems to smartly have one eye on the door; also on hand as his sidekick is an under-used Zoë Kravitz as a tatted-up tech-bro who invented a surveillance system that does something or other that basically amounts to characters yelling “Enhance! Enhance!” at the screen every so often.

This dumb movie earns all of the snark that I’m slinging at it and then some, but—it’s also kind of fine too? And not just because of Nicholas Hoult’s blond hair. It certainly didn’t need to be two hours long but Leitch knows how to manage freneticism when called for, and the gang’s many many many YouTube videos that litter the film turn out to be a lot of stupid fun. The issue really seems to be that How To Rob a Bank wants to have it both ways—it lampreys itself onto the big social issues of the day as if it has something to say about them, but then just spins around in a circle screaming “Wheeee!” for awhile. If somebody had only thought to bleach away the brainy stuff and just gone full blond we’d have all been better off. At least Nicholas Hoult got the memo!