This movie announces itself as both a period piece and a throwback with its opening frames: an unknown female in a '70s-cut bikini bottom cavorts in a blue pool as the innuendo-laden opening riff of T-Rex's "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" inspires involuntary toe-tapping. "Based on a true story," the movie's titles have told us just seconds before, and if that's in itself a fact — you never know, these days — then it's one of the most god-damnedest true stories ever. From the bikini bottom in the pool we go to a cabana or something on a tropical island, and the bikini bottom's having orgiastic sex with two locals whilst an unknown man snaps them in action. We then get a "1971 — One Year Later" scene followed by a "3 Weeks Earlier" scene, but worry not — soon The Bank Job, expertly directed by oft-ill-employed Roger Donaldson settles in to a linear, engaging, suspenseful groove. Donaldson and screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — who have a lot of atoning to do for Across the Universe and by my lights accomplish it here — evoke, for some viewers of a certain age, The Hot Rock, $, and The Thomas Crown Affair (Mach I, that is); others of a younger set will, we hope, be happy to watch Jason Statham actually act for an hour and a half before pulling out any martial arts moves.

One of the things that makes the picture work is its unusual setup. Those tropical-sex porno shots feature, as it happens, a member of Britain's royal family, and the photographer, a murderous pimp who's masking his sinister motives behind a pretense of black activism, has the snaps in a safe-deposit box in a relatively obscure London bank. Would-be drug-dealer Martine (Burrows), caught by the fuzz in customs, appeals for mercy to the MI6 agent she's been sleeping with (Lintern); he proposes the titular bank job, and Martine recruits rough-hewn Terry (Statham), a would-be auto-shop entrepreneur with some gambling debts, to put together a crew and tunnel into the safe-deposit vault. Terry's not let in on the real reason for the heist; all he and his crew need know is that there are riches in the other hundreds of boxes down there.

So here we've got intelligence agents watching criminals watched by street cops, eventually tracked by ham radio operators and hassled by building residents disturbed by the noise of the jackhammer tunneling under the vault… in other words, the usual number of nail-biting components of a heist thriller cubed. The suspense aspect works like mad, but what's also noteworthy is the character component, which at times evokes a Smash Palace-era Donaldson. The relationship between Martine and Terry is fraught, not least because Terry's happily married with two kids… And we never really know the extent to which Martine is aware that she's setting up Terry and his nifty, lovable crew (Stephen Campbell Moore and Daniel Mays being two of the more memorable performers therein) to fall, hard and nastily. This indeterminacy turns out to be one of the film's strength: it's kind of cool to see a contemporary thriller in which motivation is handled with a sharp eye and ear for ambiguity. Which is not to say that the requisite satisfying thrills aren't delivered — they are, with commendable style.