No Ordinary Heist – Glasgow Film Festival 2026 Review
Belfast, the run up to Christmas, 2004. Richard (Eddie Marsan) is the boss of a busy bank, and stressed about having to make an imminent slew of redundancies. He has a combative relationship with Barry (Éanna Hardwicke), one of his employees, who is on that redundancy list. But that becomes the least of either’s problems when Richard’s wife (Eva Birthistle) and Barry’s mother (Andrea Irvine) are kidnapped by a gang in order to get the two men to go along with a bank robbery. They must work together, if they want to both avoid being caught, and keep their loved ones alive.
No Ordinary Heist is based on true events, and perhaps the most remarkable element of the movie is the coda filling in some of the details of the case – to this date, it is still the biggest robbery ever in Ireland or Britian, which led the robbed Northern Bank to change the design of their notes to make the stolen money more difficult to spend.
Although the film opens with the usual title card for movies based on true stories, supposedly leaving themselves space for dramatization, the fact that No Ordinary Heist was based on an actual heist proves somewhat to its detriment.
Time and again, our unfortunate heroes run up against potentially threatening scenarios: they have no signal on the vault floor, so they can’t answer the phone the gang has given them as immediately as they’re meant too; a bank guard seems to sense the stolen loot in Barry’s bag; a hen party drunkenly stumbles into them mid money-transfer. And time and again, these balloons of excitement are deflated before they’d even really had the time to expand. It continually feels as if there a trepidation here about straying too far from the path of what happened, which results in continual nips of tension, but no great big juicy bites. It keeps No Ordinary Heist watchable, yet not overly memorable.
Happily, the performances are worth investing in. Both Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke are eminently convincing as men facing the worst days of their lives. Their panic is so sweatily palpable, the most unconvincing thing about the whole situation is that none of their colleagues – who are suspicious – immediately sit them down and demand to know what is going on. Besides Marsan and Hardwicke, Michelle Fairley is the other standout here, as the bank guard most closely on the tail of the two tortured souls.
While the stop-start bursts of tension are frustrating, No Ordinary Heist has a more satisfying throughline in the evolving relationship between Richard and Barry, who go from enemies to something like allies, and must stick together to make it through the ordeal. The scene near the end where they share a moment of dazed, exhausted laughter at all that has happened to them is by far the film’s best.
Ultimately No Ordinary Heist is a pretty ordinary heist movie. Still, thanks to strong performances and the fascinating story behind it, it’s a diverting enough way to spend ninety minutes.
★★★
