Reviews have dropped for How to Rob A Bank, starring Nicolaus Holt, Zoë Kravitz, Pete Davidson, Anna Sawai, and John C. Reilly, and they aren’t pretty. The movie, directed by David Leitch (Deadpool 2, The Fall Guy), hits the 2026 movie schedule this week. The reviews are not as uniformly negative as they were for another Amazon MGM movie, 2025’s War of the Worlds (How to Rob a Bank is hovering just south of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes), but they are giving me the same vibes. That’s not a good thing.
Even in some of the more positive reviews, writers aren’t impressed by the heist movie’s seemingly ham-fisted attempt to bring the classic heist movie genre into the 2020s in its presentation (and political message), just like War of the Worlds attempted (poorly) to update that classic sci-fi story with Amazon drones and Ice Cube responding to text messages for an entire movie. Caroline Siede, writing for Decoding Everything, says:
How to Rob a Bank wants to be a rallying cry for social revolution via internet community building, but it winds up feeling more like a mindless TikTok scroll.
Even the more positive reviews, like Cortlyn Kelly's 2.5-star review for Roger Ebert, call attention to this:
Breaking the silver-screen barrier, the ringleader, Ryan (Hoult), addresses his audience by stating how important they are; almost like a double entendre, the movie speaks to both its fictional audience and those in the theater. This focus on the audience is intriguing, adding depth to an otherwise standard money-heist flick. Pandering to a younger generation by contentifying the plot makes it easy for ‘How to Rob a Bank’ to one day be screened as a 212-part TikTok series.
The same can be said for the positive-ish review from The Hollywood Reporter, which is pretty harsh on the social media aspects of the film. Writer David Rooney says:
While the robberies are diverting enough and the YouTube inserts splashed with pop-up graphics, the fun wears a bit thin, which makes the shift into trauma and pathos a welcome one, even if the transition might have been smoother.
The Globe and Mail’s review of How to Rob a Bank also questions the presentation of the movie in social media form, with film critic Radheyan Simonpillai writing:
This is not a heist movie. It’s the online hack to a heist movie, curiously made for the big screen, seeking the path of least resistance to constant dopamine hits. We’re foregoing all the labour of a heist movie because it would likely be oh so tedious for the movie’s target audience, presumably the generation under 30, whose work ethic is constantly called into question.
The fact that How to Rob A Bank also tried to make an anti-establishment, anti-banking movie while being financed by Amazon isn’t helping its case, per some reviews.
For example, in his 2-star review for The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote that not only does the movie feel like it was put together by someone trying to nail the “right now” of social media and missing badly, but the political message is also lost:
It’s a little hard to stomach an anti-capitalism screed not only funded by Amazon but featuring several scenes of lame, please-aim-logo-towards-camera, product placement (after one dismantles the system, a refreshing can of Mountain Dew really does hit the spot).
Writing for The Daily Beast, Nick Schager puts the film’s attempt at a political statement even more succinctly:
Their film attempts to rage against the machine from within the (Amazon/MGM) machine.
In fact, Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, find themselves at the heart of a lot of the negative reviews. William Bibbiani at The Wrap writes:
It’s an Amazon-MGM production, which makes the film’s efforts to sell anti-capitalism as entertainment hypocritical, laughable and insulting. It’s a film that says you should stand up to Jeff Bezos, but only after you pay Jeff Bezos. No matter how cool “Atomic Blonde” director David Leitch tries to make bank robbing look, this is the opposite of cool.
I would like to note that not all of the reviews are scathing, but none are overwhelmingly positive, either. The movie seems like it delivers on action for many reviews (though some didn’t like it), but the great action sequences don’t seem to save it from itself, even if some reviews found How to Rob a Bank fun enough.
The movie also doesn’t look like it’ll be all that big of a hit at the box office, meaning it’ll likely be available to watch with a Prime subscription pretty quickly. We’ll have to see on that.
