Given that this Belfast-set true-crime thriller is based on real-life events from 2004, it sounds like something that might have made a gripping, splashy top-tier feature. But instead this feels underpowered and apologetic, clumsily assembled and blandly directed by Colin McIvor, whose filmography of TV and low-budget comedies doesn’t indicate a particular aptitude for the area. The two main male headliners, Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke, are fine, although you have to wonder why Marsan, character actor of renown as he may be, was cast instead of a local actor. Was everyone else busy shooting Game of Thrones spinoffs?
Marsan does a pretty good job nailing the Belfast accent, but still he’s a recessive kind of presence and an odd choice for the role of Richard Murray, an uptight bank manager compelled to cooperate with the robbers when his wife Celine (Eva Birthistle) is kidnapped. Murray has to cooperate with one of the bank’s security guards, Barry (Hardwicke, giving the more dynamic performance), who also has a loved one being held captive, to pack up millions of used bank notes and disguise them as rubbish that’s being collected just before Christmas. The bank robbers themselves are a fairly undifferentiated lot, apart from a deliciously skeevy character (JB Moore) who is guarding Barry’s mother (Andrea Irvine). He’s the kind of scumbag that really puts some welly into cleaning the sink after he uses it in his hostage’s home, and not in the sort of way that suggests he’s only worried about fingerprints.
There’s a faint suggestion that the robbers are from the IRA as is apparently commonly assumed now, but the Troubles here are mostly history seen in the characters’ mental rearview mirrors. That tension between past and future Northern Ireland is in itself one of the rich seams the script could have mined more thoroughly, along with a subplot about how Murray was being pressured by the bank’s owners to make half the staff redundant just before the holidays.
That last issue is of particular interest to security chief Mags (Michelle Fairley), who is worried about her own future, but that strand is just left hanging, which is a waste of Fairley. In the end it feels like the film-makers had neither the budget nor the vision to make the material sing, making for a most ordinary work.
• No Ordinary Heist is in UK and Irish cinemas from 27 March.
