‘Bullet Train’ Director’s New Action Thriller Gets a Wild Look Ahead of November 13 Release

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Nicholas Hoult has spent plenty of time playing men who should never be allowed near other people’s money. After financing increasingly terrible meals in The Menu and building a business empire as Lex Luthor in Superman, he’s taking a more direct approach in How to Rob a Bank. His latest character skips the corporate headquarters and goes straight for the cash.

Discretion, however, does not appear to be part of the business plan. The new thriller follows a crew that broadcasts its robberies online, inviting an audience to not only watch crimes most people would prefer to commit without witnesses, but to learn how to commit robberies themselves. With action director David Leitch behind the camera, a getaway was always going to require more than quietly slipping out the back door. Collider can exclusively debut a new sneak peek from How to Rob a Bank, which arrives in theaters November 13. Titled “The System Is Corrupt,” the preview offers another look at the original action thriller from Amazon MGM Studios. Hoult leads an ensemble that includes Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Pete Davidson, Rhenzy Feliz, Christian Slater, and John C. Reilly.

In Collider’s exclusive sneak peek, Zoë Kravitz and John C. Reilly are trying to make sense of the crew’s very public crime spree. Reilly’s character has a reasonable question: after robbing 15 banks, shouldn’t they have enough money to stop? Continuing to risk arrest is one thing, but posting the evidence on social media seems like an unnecessary favor to the people investigating them. Kravitz’s character sees a different motive: the robberies are making a point about a corrupt system and a system that’s broken, which means a pile of cash probably isn’t going to convince this crew to retire.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
  honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
  against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
  then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
  and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
  work.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
  because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
  defend it past the point of reason.
• You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
  an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
  rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
  administrative error.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
  The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
  bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
  and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
  and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

What Is ‘How to Rob a Bank’ About?

The crew’s growing following comes with a fairly substantial downside: people hunting bank robbers can also use the internet. Their exploits attract a veteran FBI agent and a software engineer, whose combined efforts threaten to bring the operation down. Rather than take their winnings and disappear, the robbers commit to an even more ambitious job. That premise puts Leitch back among people whose confidence tends to survive well past the point when it should. Bullet Train trapped competing killers together with very different ideas about how their assignments would go, while The Fall Guy sent a stunt performer into a conspiracy that demanded rather more than his usual professional willingness to get knocked around. Here, the criminals have the added complication of an audience. Every successful robbery gives them another reason to believe they can get away with the next one.

Collider is also hosting an early screening of How to Rob a Bank on November 11, and you can win tickets to the event here. How to Rob a Bank opens in theaters November 13.

How to Rob a Bank