B is for Bandits

September 2024 Movie Challenge-Day 2

For today’s film, I went back into the archives a bit to revisit the 2001 Barry Levinson film Bandits, starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Curiously, it was a film I know I’ve seen before, but for some reason, didn’t really remember much of it, so it still felt like a bit of a first time watch this time around.

Escaped prison inmates Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) and Joe (Bruce Willis) are pitting against each other with the arrival of Kate (Cate Blanchett) in their lives.

First and foremost, Bandits is the type of film that isn’t made anymore, and honestly couldn’t be made today. The story is told with a framing device where we meet Joe (Willis) and Terry (Thornton) robbing a bank in Southern California and are told right at the beginning that they don’t make it out of the robbery alive. We get a small flashback of them appearing at the home of the host of an America’s Most Wanted knock off to tell their story, which then launches us into the main action of the story, starting with them breaking out of prison and robbing a bank.

Terry stumbles on the brilliant idea of robbing banks by spending the night with the bank manager the night before, bringing him (or her) and his entire family to the bank in the morning as hostages, and avoiding the alarms, the shooting of guns, and general mayhem.

Things go well for the pair, enlisting the help of wannabe stunt man Harvey (Troy Garity) as their get away driver, and successfully knock off a few banks in Oregon on their way south to Mexico. Enter Kate Wheeler (Cate Blanchett), a depressed housewife who wants some excitement in her life and falls alternately for both Joe and Terry, ultimately causing a love triangle.