Movies

The standoff starts in medias res, with bystander Jinx (Nick Stahl) locked in a bank vault with Jessica (Erika Christensen, in Meg White wig), herself forced into a life of crime by the lack of career opportunities for gorgeous young thoroughbreds. The rest of the stickup team is cornered in the lobby; the SWAT team's guarding the street beyond. Despite an 81-minute runtime, the plot has to stretch to go the distance, mostly by reiterating its theme (the danger of ATM surcharges) compulsively. So we get an endless chain of cell-phone negotiations, spritzes of "kinetic" stylization that not even a home- schooled adolescent seeing his first movie could find cool, and a sepulchral whiff of the mid-'90s in the form of Roger Avary mannerisms and that guy from Bush (Gavin Rossdale), now an actor. Even the mighty Terry Crews, who made White Chicks sporadically watchable, is herein defeated. So objectively awful it ceases even to be a reflection of writer- director Andrews Jenkins's non-talent, How to Rob a Bank calls into question the distribution filtration process that should protect delicate consumer eyes from things like this. WTF IFC?