The Banker Is a Disappointingly Rushed and Paint-By-Numbers Affair

Ever since he was a kid, Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) was all about challenging the status quo. A math genius, Garrett has long harbored dreams of being a real estate broker. That's not an occupation usually filled by Black people in the mid-20th century. But again, Garrett's a rebel and he's not about to let the racist status quo hold him back. Eventually, Garrett, after pairing up with Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), begins to create an empire of real estate, one that most people aren't aware they control. That's because Garrett and Morris have had Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult) pose as the owner of their business to white investors and fellow business owners. Steiner is the face of the operation but Garrett and Morris are the ones controlling all the cards.



Despite having such an intriguing premise,  The Banker is the bog-standard biopic movie in nearly every respect. In some areas, it's a competent version of that kind of movie. Yet, it rarely stretches its creative muscles enough to exceed the most underwhelming trappings of this subgenre. This is especially true of the script for The Banker. Like so many biopics, The Banker compresses too many real-life events into a single movie. This drawback is apparent from the start, as The Banker opts for three separate prologues before actually getting the story of Garrett underway. So many false starts and only one (a flashback to adolescent Garrett eavesdropping on bankers) really helps to illuminate the protagonist.

For the rest of the film, The Banker places quantity over quality. A quartet of screenwriters (which include the film's director, George Nolfi) hurriedly hop from one event in Bernard Garrett's life to the next without stopping to take a breath. This means his friendship with Joe Morris just sort of happens, there's never a chance for us to see them gradually become allies. Meanwhile, Garrett's wife,  Eunice (Nia Long), vanishes from the proceedings for distractingly long periods of time. On top of all that, The Banker chooses to speed through time by leaning on montages so heavily it verges on becoming a parody of itself.

The best example of how rushed The Banker is comes in how, midway through the movie, we get a random shot of Matt Steiner getting married to a waitress he talked to once. If The Banker is in such a hurry that it can't pause to linger on the wedding of one of its main characters for more than ten seconds, maybe it needs to re-evaluate itself. The biggest victim of The Banker's rushed storytelling turns out to be Garrett himself. His perspective is always getting flattened by The Banker's urge to get to the next real-life event in Garrett's life. There's rarely a moment where we get a chance to just sit and soak in who Garrett is as a person and how he feels about the challenges & victories of his risky job.

Moments where we do get to explore this character's perspective (like his reasons for refusing to even dress up as a janitor) suggest a more thought-provoking movie. Instead, The Banker puts quantity over quality in its screenwriting. As a result, the movie ends up being less engaging than it should be, even with a solid group of actors at its disposal. Anthony Mackie, for example, does fine work portraying a guy who has a composed exterior but a rebel's heart. Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson makes for an amusing live-wire counter to the more stalwart Garrett. Jackson's immense levels of charisma make him perfect for this part and his chemistry with Mackie makes one wish they had a better movie to inhabit.

Director George Nolfi opts to reinforce The Banker's derivative nature by lending the movie a thoroughly generic look. There's little in the way of distinct or clever camerawork to be found here. Much of The Banker is filled in a stagnant manner, which is a missed opportunity given how often the production is evoking the tone of classic heist movies. Those are films where the placement of the camera means everything, there's always an extra layer of intent lying in the camerawork. Unfortunately, The Banker evokes that genre only in surface-level details and not in inventive camerawork. While the visuals and script for The Banker won't offend anyone, they do come off as so stale and adherent to biopic movie cliches. Couldn't a real-life story so trailblazing get a movie adaptation that was similarly bold?