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There is a platitude, beloved of the documentary group, that fact is stranger than fiction. It’s typically appropriate. But these days I’ve been anxious that the glut of documentary content material required to fill the yawning maw of streamers is placing this axiom to the take a look at extra regularly. Not all tales are worthy of the documentary remedy.
Such, sadly, is the difficulty with “How to Rob a Bank” (on Netflix), one more true-crime documentary. Its administrators, Seth Porges and Stephen Robert Morse, have turned out nice work previously — Porges as co-director of the fascinating “Class Action Park”; Morse as producer of the influential “Amanda Knox.” This movie feels extra perfunctory, a robust instance of the type of documentary that would have simply been a podcast. (Of course, it has been.)
The movie tells the true story of Scott Scurlock, a free-spirited fellow recognized to Washington State regulation enforcement brokers because the Hollywood Bandit. (Sometimes they dropped the bandit half.) In the Nineteen Nineties, he pulled off a whopping 19 confirmed financial institution robberies within the Seattle space, stealing greater than $2.3 million, with the help of a couple of buddies and a few elaborate disguises.
“How to Rob a Bank” is stuffed with re-enactments of the robberies and interviews with buddies and associates, who clarify that Scurlock was a mild soul who lived in an unlimited treehouse that was a hub for his buddies. He additionally cooked meth for some time, was an adrenaline junkie and journaled rather a lot about looking for his goal in life.
Police officers and investigators are much less sanguine about Scurlock, noting at one level that financial institution theft isn’t a victimless crime, even when no one will get harm bodily. It could be traumatic to anybody who was contained in the financial institution, and to a teller going through a gun. Scurlock tried to color his crimes as altruistic, and did give away a few of his cash to buddies in want. But individuals have been nonetheless harm — together with, finally, Scurlock himself.
There’s fairly a bit to chew on on this story, issues the movie factors to however doesn’t actually study. The inflow of cash into Seattle within the Nineteen Nineties made it an amazing place for financial institution robberies, as a number of individuals notice, and likewise made it fertile floor for punk and grunge actions.
Perhaps the extra attention-grabbing component is that Scurlock watched motion pictures like “Heat” and “Point Break” to determine learn how to pull off the crimes. The nickname, “Hollywood,” got here from his costumes and make-up, nevertheless it may as effectively have been about his worldview. After all, Hollywood motion pictures are most individuals’s connection to financial institution robbers, with movies like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Dog Day Afternoon” among the many biggest classics of American cinema. What do they educate us to consider these crimes? How did they form Scurlock’s blindness to his actual victims?
“How to Rob a Bank” isn’t actually excited by these larger questions, as a substitute heading in a extra desultory path. What startled me was the belief that whereas Scurlock did handle an unusually lengthy string of robberies, the remainder of the story wasn’t almost as wild because the documentary’s framing may counsel. The story was of a person who felt misplaced, and saved making an attempt to fill the void inside him with pleasure and hazard. In the top, that’s not unusual in any respect.
