The Bank Job (2008)

Modesty!  The Bank Job has it in spades.  Content to spin its convoluted yarn with good-natured efficacy, it doesn't bog itself down with backstory or THEMES, but rather transmits its begrimed characters' hopes and dreams through a glance that lasts a beat too long or a touch that presses a millimeter too deep.  So the meat of the film is in the faces, specifically Jason Statham's and Saffron Burrows',  who otherwise scamper about with the speed appropriate to a big time heist.  But then they cast a glance, a glance first charged with sex and then with suspicion with a splash of death.  These glances take up maybe 5 minutes of the film's 1 hour and 50 minute run time.  

There's plenty of decent heisting set-pieces, filmed with workmanlike efficiency by Roger Donaldson, but nothing too flashy.  It's a film that feels like a job of work, as John Ford was fond of saying, but a job that employs great craftsmen who almost cover up the seams of the creaky material (but not entirely).  It has its dull moments in the cliched aftermath of the robbery, but then Saffron's lashes and Statham's bullet-shaped skull engage in a minuet of longing and retreat, which make me overrate this diverting piece of work - so here I am, overrating it.  It's a treat.