How To Rob A Bank IS an instruction manual – but not for heists
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
A string of almost 20 Seattle bank robberies, committed by a charismatic UNSUB whom law enforcement nicknamed "Hollywood."
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The story (spoilers ahead, though; jump to the rec box to avoid them!)
Almost every other review of How To Rob A Bank, out earlier this week on Netflix, is at pains to note that the documentary's title is not in fact a promise, so it's hacky of me to say the same thing – but I will anyway, if only to note that said title is one of the film's few flaws. Not that I needed or expected a For Dummies on successful heisting – but How To Rob A Bank does some of its best work when it's collaging Hollywood's bank-job process over the course of several years.
Of course, there's only so much detail it can provide given that Hollywood himself (government name: Scott Scurlock) isn't a doc participant, but HTRAB directors Stephen Robert Morse (Amanda Knox) and Seth Porges (Class Action Park) have rounded up just about everyone else with insight into willfully off-grid treetop dweller Hollywood, including bank tellers; Hollywood's family and childhood friends; Hollywood's co-conspirators Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers; and law-enforcement jurisdictional squabblers Shawn Johnson (the FBI) and Mike Magan (Seattle PD), who are still snarking on each other three decades after their joint task force got its man. (Well, sort of. Their man did get got, just not by them, quite.)
What the documentary does provide a useful guidebook for is deft, clever execution of a true-crime story at a runtime the story dictates. I would bet non-dye-packed money execs lobbied hard for HTRAB as a multi-part property, but a feature doc is usually what's called for, and especially in a narrative whose "protagonist" is dead – which might explain, partly, the rationale for the off-plumb title – there's only so long you can bury that lede. Some viewers will wish you'd spent more time on nuts-and-bolts planning intel (and less on footage of Scurlock swanning stark naked around The Treehouse, his fully appointed canopy condo, although this viewer was not opposed). The sequences devoted to reminding us that even a non-lethal heist like Hollywood's (or his PNW legend-mate DB Cooper's) isn't a victimless crime seem rushed, or like an "okay, fine" response to a network note, given HTRAB has devoted significant time to the idea that Hollywood was smooth and controlled, running whole scenes by himself on sheer charisma.
The film is content to leave that unresolved, though, or to sit (and let us sit) with the idea that Hollywood and Scurlock were both things…and it's not obliged to pad the runtime with vague pronouncements about duality or cheesy pan/scans. HTRAB mentions Scurlock's apparent inspirations in Point Break and other scripted heist stories; it illustrates action sequences with rich storyboard-style animation by Studio Orca, complete with stage directions, instead of relying solely on out-of-focus re-enactors; and it doesn't have to stretch its budget or script across three 47-minute segments.
And it knows there's only so long it has with an audience before, because they've seen a documentary before, they're like, "Either this guy wouldn't participate in this" – which, given everything we learn from the jump about Scurlock's resolutely non-traditional way of being in the world, is actually not outside the realm – "or he can't, because either his meth-production contacts or this got him killed." It's 2024; genre storytellers can't beat the second screen, they can only try to outlast it for a while.
I resisted Duck Duck Going the denouement here; I'd deduced the what, but How To Rob A Bank's momentum and watchability let me wait patiently for the how. - SDB