rated R

While applauding a filmmaker for boldly breaking genre conventions, one should take a moment to consider why those conventions found their way into the process in the first place. In the case of the most successful heist pictures, the things we generally expect to see is ingenuity, flash, danger, gadgetry, romance and coolness. By successfully delivering a thoughtful, complex and realistic version of a very familiar type of story, “The Bank Job” effectively turns the genre on its proverbial head. But, in so doing, unfortunately, it undoes everything that makes a heist picture fun.

Ostensibly based on an actual bank robbery that occurred at Lloyd’s Bank of London in 1971, it makes sense that the filmmakers would grind off some of genre’s sharper edges for verisimilitude’s sake. Real life larceny is probably a fairly sloppy business, and not often pulled off by swaggering gin ’n’ tonic pretty-boys like George Clooney or Steve McQueen.

But here’s the thing: The story, which is mainly concerned with the clumsy yammering of the perps on public radio channels as they burrowed their tunnel to the safe deposit vault, flurried across the headlines of British newspapers at the time and then promptly disappeared. Rumors that the government threw down an order to suppress the story, along with the fact that none of the lifted loot was ever recovered and none of the criminals involved were apprehended, has, over time, elevated the incident to a full blown urban legend. Writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais (whose schizophrenic careers have seen them collaborate on projects as divergent as the animated “Flushed Away” and Julie Taymor’s recent “Across the Universe”) had their work cut out for them filling in the considerable holes left between the few facts of the case. Their hypotheses involve some positively Oliver Stone-level shenanigans, starting with a secret plan of MI-5 to retrieve some, ahem, compromising photographs of the royal family and proceeding headlong into high-level blackmail, international race wars, extortion, torture, pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking and, yes, murder. In fact, the hapless robbers at the center of all this villainy may themselves be the most innocent of anyone involved.

Which brings us to Jason Statham. Well known as a world-class gravel chewing, hairy-fisted, bullet headed bulldog, his casting here as an aging street hooligan may have been predicated on his previous roles as thieves (“Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”), thugs (“Snatch”) and mercenaries (“Transporters 1 and 2”). But don’t be fooled. In much the same way as the movie seeks to reinvent its own foundations, Statham seems to be attempting to prove to the world that he can rise above the stereotype he’s worked so hard to establish. He doesn’t actually head butt anyone until the final act, and even when he does, it comes off as a conspicuous addition to the otherwise restrained action. It’s as if the marketing team on the job, afraid Statham’s core audience might not relate, requested some footage specifically to splice into the trailer. He makes an admirable attempt at emotion and nuance, but you just can’t escape the impression that everything he knows about acting was learned on a rugby field.

The film stock itself has some roughened period grit to it, and the soundtrack makes a few pronounced jabs at establishing the era, but, otherwise, any ’70s cache has been jettisoned. This is not a Guy Ritchie joint, or Quentin Tarantino. Unapologetically aimed at the art-house crowd, it seems that director Roger Donaldson (most recently known for “The World’s Fastest Indian,” but previously for “Cadillac Man” and “The Bounty”) has made a conscious effort to avoid any pretension of hipness that the early ’70s London setting might have offered.

Though truly a valiant effort to weave together an intricate plot across borders international, social and financial, the core of the story’s appeal—that some street-level fish ’n’ chippers might have once overcome the powers of the fois gras aristocracy—is sadly submerged under the ultimately unbelievable knot of conspiracies, backstabbings and cover-ups. The robbery itself is given fairly short shrift, and the players on hand are not sexy, sophisticated or even all that smart.

Though the job goes down, and our “heroes” do manage to wriggle away from the authorities amid all the intricate plotting, they do it by no ingenuity of their own. After being set free from the back of a patrol car, one of the crew members asks Statham’s character how he got released. As they slink back into the grubby streets of London, rubbing the handcuff marks on their wrists, his answer says a lot. “I have no idea. Just keep walkin’.” Given the alleged circumstances, that response may be fairly realistic, but it’s really just not that cool.