As a heist movie, How to Rob a Bank is too long and surface-level to clinch a big cinematic score. As an illustration of what mainstream Hollywood allows in its depiction of “rebellious” and “screw the system!” characters, though, it’s downright valuable. Writer Mark Bianculli’s script follows a pack of colorful bank robbers, led by Ryan (Nicholas Hoult), who document their exploits on YouTube. They also deliver videos criticizing the corrupt American status quo where income inequality runs rampant. Ryan (behind his trusty wolf mask) laments a broken “capitalist system” while he and his cohorts offer advice on matters like how to endure a police interrogation.

Ah, but don’t worry, centrist/right-wing viewers. How to Rob a Bank makes its depiction of vaguely leftist societal rebels “palatable.” For one thing, there’s only one lady (Ryan’s wife, played by Anna Sawai) amongst the six bank robbers. The focus primarily leans on the group’s white male members, one of whom, Vince (Pete Davidson), is a veteran. None of these characters display clothing or physical attributes challenging conventional gender norms.

Ryan basically says #NotAllCops in one video about American policing. Andrew Schulz makes a cameo as himself, for some reason. There’s never any mention of specific inequality facing marginalized genders, the LGBTQIA+ community, or other oppressed groups that right-wingers demonize*. Heck, How to Rob a Bank’s opening montage chronicling these kooky robbers is set to the Hives tune “Tick Tick Boom.” I deeply enjoy that toe-tapping number. However, it’s already appeared in so many movies, including Jumper and Friday the 13th from the late 2000s. It’s something immediately familiar to most viewers, which makes the actions of Ryan’s and his cohorts less shocking.

Resorting to a well-worn needle drop captures how Bianculli and director David Leitch’s creative instincts keep sanding the edges off their lead characters. It’s the inevitable byproduct of trying to channel Costa-Gavras’ Z or Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You in a feature financed by Amazon money and produced by a Trump voter.

Lingering on these political attributes is more interesting than How to Rob a Bank’s generally perfunctory storytelling impulses. While Ryan and his crew keep launching new internet-fueled heists, FBI Agent West (John C. Reilly) recruits tech wiz Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz) to help him capture the thieves in exchange for ending her house arrest sentence. Engaging performers Reilly and Kravitz have solid chemistry together. Bianculli’s screenplay gives the duo some nice bonding moments (like when West snags the persistently hungry Gardner a lollipop) and lets West be an unabashedly messy, jagged person with Cheetos in her hair.

However, their sequences together are also often very dry. Their detective work in uncovering potential clues leading to Ryan’s whereabouts are particularly flat. Adding insult to injury is how extraneous their scenes are by the end. As How to Rob a Bank goes on, Gardner (who initially seems like a co-lead in the movie) largely vanishes. Once the finale arrives, she’s just a silent spectator to everything going on around her. There’s no climactic utilization of her tech skills nor any payoffs to some pre-established character flaw. She’s just standing around, occasionally looking nervous.

Despite Reilly and Kravitz’s talents, the FBI-centric material suffers from a dearth of personality and energy. That problem becomes especially fatal in How to Rob a Bank’s sluggish second half. David Leitch is becoming the Judd Apatow of action movies in his inability to embrace succinct runtimes. After Atomic Blonde and The Fall Guy long ran out of gas before they reached their end credits, How to Rob a Bank once more sees Leitch stretching an 80-minute film into 115+ interminable minutes.

Here, the bloat comes from excessive treacle. How to Rob a Bank starts out with a bang centering on YouTube videos full of rapid cuts, urgent robberies, and chatter about systemic inequality. Eventually, though, everything boils down to mournful characters shouting about their backstories. The various Rob a Bank figures aren’t layered enough to sustain such intimate sequences. Ryan’s largely defined through internet antics like shilling for QR codes or excreting a stream of cartoon urine. He’s not an Anton Chekhov character instantly gripping your attention with a monologue.

To boot, Leitch and cinematographer Jonathan Sela don’t frame these sentimental segments in especially interesting ways. These flat visual impulses accentuate how tedious How to Rob a Bank becomes. It’s one thing to struggle realizing leftist social commentary ambitions. It’s another to puzzlingly downplay the excitement and thrills in your bank heist movie. In all fairness, the pulse-pounding set pieces that do appear are largely well realized. A mid-movie car chase is especially nicely edited as the camera cuts around from the bank robbers in one automobile to West and Gardner in another nearby vehicle.

Plus, there’s worse casts to spend two hours with than the one How to Rob a Bank assembles. It’s especially a treat seeing John C. Reilly in a theatrical wide release movie for the first time since 2018. C’mon Hollywood, keep putting Dewey Cox in big screen titles! As the leading man, Nicholas Hoult is fine. However, his zany portrayal of Ryan’s online persona (which even comes complete with occasional cutaway gags) exudes too much Ryan Reynolds energy. In contrast, he’s never given immense specificity defining Ryan’s everyday offline personality. Even the revolutionary texts in his house are generic works failing to illuminate what ideological strain he subscribes to. Hoult does what he can with the part, but there’s just not much here.

How to Rob a Bank occasionally displays some enjoyable anarchic energy or rebellious spirit (the latter manifesting in references to the Uvalde school shooting or cops “terrorizing citizens”). Even certain goofy details, like one robbery mask covered in the words “LIKE” and “SUBSCRIBE”, at least feel like attempts to make something communicate with the here and now. Unfortunately, too much of How to Rob a Bank monotonously goes through the motions instead of constantly lighting a fire in the belly of its viewers. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” Karl Marx once declared. Those same proletarians, though, have much to gain by checking out superior bank heist motion pictures.

* = Reagan does have a laptop with stickers saying things like “Black Lives Matter” and various pro-LGBTQIA+ slogans.

How to Rob a Bank hits theaters everywhere on November 13.