Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist

On 13 January 2006 armed men entered a branch of Banco Río in the Acassuso district of Buenos Aires and took hostages. The police surrounded the building and negotiated for hours. When they went in they found no one. The robbers had got into the vault, opened hundreds of safe deposit boxes, and left through a tunnel they had dug into the sewer beneath the branch. The tunnel was dug not to get in but to get out. Matías Gueilburt's documentary proceeds through the account of the people who planned it: Fernando Araujo, Luis Mario Vitette, Sebastián García Bolster and others sit in front of the camera. What is interesting in the narrative is not the detail of the method but the way the men tell it as a work of art, and the film's difficulty deciding how far to join them in that frame. The robbery was called the heist of the century in Argentina. The crew was caught afterwards. Who it's for: Viewers who like heist documentaries, true crime, and recent Argentine history. Who it's not for: The film gives the floor to the perpetrators and almost none to the victims, and the imbalance is noticeable. The reenactments are also overdressed.