Review: 'How to Rob a Bank' steals your time and any goodwill you may have for heist movies

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Set us as preferred Banks are where the money is, the old quick-cash saying goes (attributed to robber Willie Sutton).But in the livestream age, clicks are a currency you don’t need to break the law to accumulate.

And yet the energetic gang of camera-ready young smash-and-grabbers of “How to Rob a Bank” — led by a blond, online-savvy Nicholas Hoult — want both paper and page views, so they can remind everyone who the real thief is: a greedy socioeconomic apparatus stacked against them.Et tu, Jeff Bezos? (Amazon MGM is the film’s studio.) Don’t get your hopes up.The movie’s fight-the-power appeal lasts about as long as a TikTok clip before succumbing to dull character tropes and the decidedly unanarchic blahs of action-comedy mechanics.

No one’s anti-establishment heart is getting stolen here, just your time.The premise of Mark Bianculli’s screenplay tries to reposition content creators as modern-day Robin Hoods.Ryan (Hoult) and his team — partner Emi (Anna Sawai), army vet pal Vince (Pete Davidson) and tech whiz Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz) — film their every job, editing the crimes like they were extreme sports, then uploading them as irreverent, statistic-laden tutorials on how to take advantage of capitalism.

Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.As their fan base grows (a “support” montage includes cameo-ing podcasters like Scott Galloway and the “Flagrant” hosts), the gang incurs the focused ire of grizzled FBI agent John West (a regrettably muted John C.Reilly).

His secret weapon is a convicted hacker with pattern recognition skills named Reagan, a role so unimaginatively conceived that Zoë Kravitz seems like she was pulled from an improv night to cosp...