Introduction / Sypnosis:

Petty-criminal-gone-straight Terry Leather (Jason Statham) owns a failing car-sales garage and is being harassed by two debt-collectors. His friend, Kevin’s ex-girlfriend, Martine (Saffron Burrows) offers Terry a chance to earn enough money to never worry about debt again: a bank robbery in Baker Street, London. Terry gathers a bunch of petty-criminal friends, including Kevin, to help execute the plan. They lease a shop two lots away from the bank and start digging a tunnel underneath The Chicken Inn (a chicken fast-food restaurant) in order to reach the underground bank vault. Terry employs Eddie (Michael Jibson), a worker in his garage, as a “watchman” with a walkie-talkie to sit on the roof of the building opposite and keep a look out for trouble.

What they don’t know is that Martine, who has been caught smuggling heroin into Britain and desperately wants to avoid jail, is setting them up on behalf of MI5, which wants the contents of a certain safe deposit box (No. 118) within the bank. This safe deposit box contains compromising photos of a female member of the British Royal Family (identified in the film as Princess Margaret) participating in a threesome. The photos are in a box belonging to a black militant who calls himself Michael X; he is using the photos to avoid trouble with the Metropolitan Police, and MI5 is desperate to keep the photos out of circulation.

As Terry and his crew dig, their radio chatter draws the attention of a local amateur radio operator, who listens in on the conversation and realises he’s overhearing a bank robbery in progress. He calls the police, but with a ten-mile radius to search and a lack of concrete details, they fail to pin the robbery down.