Why Roger Donaldson should never win an Oscar

Oh why can’t Hollywood be this efficient more often? Why can’t we see more films made with such precision, with such gentle artistry, with such a well developed script, sense of style, cast so brilliantly, as The Bank Job? Why? It seems unfair. This is the kind of film that just makes all the other films in the caper genre look bad. The Bank Job is not an all time masterpiece, it will not win any Oscars, it will likely not end up on anybody’s best of the year list, but it is pitch-perfect genre entertainment. The kind of movie that should make the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie weep for the day that they thought they could craft movies this well.

Roger Donaldson, the ever-reliable Aussie director who has been behind quality genre-movies for decades, has come through once again, and this time is no exception that people will fail to remember his name. The man who put together the period remake of The Bounty, the fanboy favorite Species, and most recently the wonderfully saccharine-free heartwarmer The World’s Fastest Indian, has made a movie that looks so slick and stylish without a single fancy edit, without showcasing an older, faded star of the time period, and without filling to the brim super-duper catchy dialogue. His craft is so good and simple that nobody will notice the skill behind it. At least he has the decency not to broadcast that fact. Were it any number of other hot-shot directors the movie would be splashed with all sorts of over the top references to how great the guys at the helm are. This zealousness often leads to quality pictures breaking down or becoming so glitz laden that nothing ends up believable at all.

The story is one that would seem so incredulous and reeking of the post-Pulp Fiction lust to write in far too many characters, too many subplots, and too many clever situations. That is until you remember that this is a true story (don’t worry, the movie lets you know it). The heist itself, pretty simple by today’s Ocean 11 standards, has the decency to play itself out. It lasts a good 45 minutes or so. The drama as always is in the aftermath. It all catches fire when the robbers realize that the reason the bank was robbed in the first place was to recover some very compromising photos of a certain member of royalty. When other compromising photos of some Lords in Whitehall are uncovered even more people join in the increasingly violent chase for all and everyone involved. There’s also a book of police payouts kept by a shady pornographer that gets him into the mix.

And perhaps a word about casting; so often we have a beautiful story like this that simply never gets made unless there is some Hollywood A-lister attached, regardless of the point that they may not be right for the part. Jason Statham however, the great but very one dimensional cockney actor made famous in the Transporter movies and Guy Ritchie crime flicks, plays here exactly what he was meant to play, a Cockney man of the streets, hustling for the one big score that will take him and his family out of the dangerous street life once and for all. Statham is not a dynamic actor that needs to be seen in the thankfully underseen period adventure movie In The Name of The King. He is one of those rare finds like Jason Lee that needs to play characters that he understands. A semi-streetwise Cockney Londoner is exactly the role Statham needs to play.

A short note to finish, and I mean this with all the warmth in my heart, I pray that Roger Donaldson never wins an Oscar.. Oscars have a tendency to taint the career of the director who win them. Most often they go to directors who make it a point to craft artistic films that are meant to be seen as such. Occasionally however, they go to directors who thrive in the genre-film side of the industry who happen to make something that is massively well-received. Sadly for them, expectations get raised up with each subsequent movie they make. Directors like John G. Avildsen (Rocky), John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), even Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) all continued to make well-made genre pictures post-Oscar though critical reception often suffered because they didn’t always strive to make the Oscar-caliber pictures that people now came to expect. Too bad for them. They were just enjoying their work. I therefore hope that the likes of Donaldson, Matthew Vaughn, and to a lesser extent Stephen Frears and Peter Weir never win the big one but get to keep making their terrific movies in peace rather than be subject to post-Oscar frenzy.