The big screen bank robbery seems to be the preserve of America with high security vaults penentrated by hi-tech computers and the odd big drill.

Brit capers have veered from the appalling (Buster, the logjam of geezer comedies following Lock, Stock...) to the sublime (The Lavender Hill Mob, The Italian Job, Sexy Beast).

Heading back almost forty years to the early Seventies, director Roger Donaldson and scriptwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have taken as their raw material the notorious "walkie-talkie" bank robbery.

In 1971, a gang of robbers tunneled 40ft from a derelict shop through three feet of reinforced concrete into Lloyds Bank at the top of Baker Street and ransacked 268 safe deposit boxes.

Blurring into urban legend, rumour has it that the gang - whose haul allegedly included nationally sensitive material - were never caught and given false identities to live a lotus-eating life abroad.

Donaldson's fitfully interesting yarn is less Ocean's Eleven and more Thames Estuary Seven as the ever-dependable if limited Statham is tempted into the job by good-time ex-model Martine (Burrows).

She's been caught smuggling charlie into Britain and faces a long stretch unless she agrees to MI5 demands to recruit a gang to snatch the incriminating contents of a deposit box.

They are an assortment of snaps ranging from kinky aristos in S&M torture chambers (cf Scandal) to a blurry set of pix featuring a senior royal immersed in a steamy threesome. On no account must the identity of the randy Windsor ever see the light of day (actually it's Princess Margaret with Arthur Askey and Field Marshall Montgomery).

This is strong on the turn of the decade period - the age of free love morphing into its seedy commercial equivalent in Soho - and the performances are up to snuff.

The trouble is that the tone swings from the sort of typically English caper where you expect to see Norman Wisdom walking into a lamp-post to Guy Ritchie territory and the eye-wincing blow-torching of someone's leg.

With a collective age of 140, the writers' narrative sounds dated and not just because it's set back in the era of Ted Heath, the Ulster Troubles and the Spacehopper.

The conspiracy theory is also a bit pants - Clement and La Frenais are not exactly comedy John Pilgers - while the various plot strands, including a nasty Jamaican pimp/freedom fighter - end up tied in knots.

It's watchable...but to some people so was Last of the Summer Wine.

Tim Evans