It’s like this. In September of 1971, the British newspapers were full of the news of the brazen robbery of a safe-deposit vault at a Baker Street bank. There are some astonishing details that, if you’re up on your London urban legends -- since this really did happen, we need to use that word only in the sense of “legendary,” not in the sense of “myth” -- you probably already know, but which I won’t reveal here because if you don’t already know them, they add a refreshingly original kind of suspense to what’s unfolding onscreen. Suffice to say that the cops manage to find out about the robbery while it’s in progress, and they still can’t do a damn thing to stop it.

Calculations on the losses to the thieves are attempted, but the figure is literally incalculable. These are safe deposit boxes. This is where people put their valuable stuff when they don’t want the bank to know what they’re are hiding there. Hardly anyone comes forward to make a claim against their losses.

And then -- and here is where the really insidious, really juicy conspiracy-theory stuff comes in -- after a few days, the story disappears from the newspapers. It’s just gone, like it never existed. Rumors of a government coverup abound. Rumors run wild about what could possibly have been stolen from those boxes -- maybe just one of those boxes -- that would prompt the government to quash the story.

That’s where The Bank Job exists, in the delicious space between all the unknowns, filling in those blanks, guessing on some of it but working from as many possibly known quantities as it can. Maybe it’s not the 100-percent truth -- maybe it’s half, or more, invented. But it’s a damn good guess, and a ridiculously entertaining one.

Jason Statham (War, Crank) -- whom I’ve never much liked before, but he’s perfect here -- leads a band of, well, patsies, though of course they don’t know that’s what they are: guys who’ve been set up to pull off this break-in and take out something that the British covert agencies really, really need to keep secret. (The someone it belongs to is threatening to go public with it, and it’s that someone’s box the thing needs to be stolen from.) Statham’s small-time crook Terry cooks up a careful plan for the job, but he’s suspicious, of course, of the old girlfriend, Martine (Saffron Burrows: Reign Over Me, Troy), who brought it to him, and he’s right to be. Terry ain’t the brightest bulb, but he ain’t totally stupid, either, and he knows she’s up to something.

We do too, which is part of the brilliance of the script by the team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe, Flushed Away): we know more than Terry does, and even if we don’t know it all, even if we can’t guess how it’s all going to shake out, we know it’s not gonna be good... but it is gonna be a whole helluva lot of fun getting there. That much is obvious from the get-go.

Did I say I didn’t want to live in this world? It’s not so bad, actually, if we’ve got no choice. Director Roger Donaldson (The Recruit, Thirteen Days) makes the cynicism of not being able to trust anyone but a crook like Terry -- who’s not a bad guy at all, even if his work is a bit shady -- seem like an okay place to be. And The Bank Job ends up being a fresh and cheery spin on the heist movie. Cuz it really is easy to root for Terry and his gang, like we always want to root for the villains in movies like these. Because the acknowledged villains are the only ones worth rooting for.

(Technorati tags: Bank Job, Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows)