No Ordinary Heist review – Eddie Marsan stars in this Belfast true crime thriller about a massive bank robbery | film

gAlthough this true-crime thriller set in Belfast is based on real-life events from 2004, it feels like something that might have made an exhilarating, first-rate thriller. But instead it feels weak and apologetic, clumsily put together and blandly directed by Colin McIvor, whose TV movies and low-budget comedies do not suggest a special aptitude for the territory. The two leads, Eddie Marsan and Ianna Hardwicke, are good, although you have to wonder why Marsan, a well-known actor, was chosen instead of a local actor. Has everyone been busy filming Game of Thrones events?

Marsan does a very good job of nailing the Belfast accent, but he still has a kind of withdrawn presence and an odd choice in the role of Richard Murray, an uptight bank manager who is forced to team up with thieves when his wife, Celine (Eva Birthistle), is kidnapped. Murray has to team up with a bank security guard, Barry (Hardwick, giving the most dynamic performance), who also has a family member in detention, to bag up millions of used bills and hide them as trash to be collected just before Christmas. The bank robbers themselves are a fairly undifferentiated group, aside from the delicious character (J.P. Moore) who guards Barry’s mother (Andrea Irvin). He’s the kind of scumbag who goes out of his way to clean the sink after he uses it in his hostage’s house, and not in a way that suggests he’s only worried about fingerprints.

There is a faint suggestion that the thieves are IRA as is now commonly assumed, but the problems here are mostly history seen in the characters’ mental rear-view mirrors. This tension between Northern Ireland’s past and future is itself one of the rich connections that the screenplay could have mined more carefully, along with a subplot about how Murray is pressured by the bank’s owners to make half the staff redundant just before the holidays.

This last case is of particular interest to security chief Mags (Michelle Fairley), who is concerned about her future, but this thread is left dangling, which is a waste for Fairley. In the end, it’s as if the filmmakers had neither the budget nor the vision to make the material sing, which makes the work very mediocre.