Reel Rundown: ‘How to Rob a Bank’ offers inside look into minds of thrill-seeking robbers
If ever there was a click-bait title for a film, “How to Rob a Bank” is it.
If you look on IMDb.com, you’ll discover no less than five such titles, one of which even adds the parenthetical phrase “(and 10 Tips to Actually Get Away With It).”
Netflix is the latest to use the gimmick, applying it to a documentary co-directed by Stephen Robert Morse and Seth Porges about a guy who headed up a bank-robbing crew that worked the streets of Seattle during the 1990s.
But Morse and Porges aren’t so much interested in teaching us the finer points of how to commit armed robbery as they are in focusing on the character of one particular guy. A guy who, for reasons it seems that he himself didn’t fully understand, became obsessed with walking into a bank, wielding a pistol and demanding money.
Obsessed, sure, but successful as well. Between the years 1992 and 1996, Scurlock – aided by others, including Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers, both of whom are interviewed by the filmmakers – robbed at least 17 (some reports say 19) banks, grabbing more than $2.3 million in the process.
Their crime wave came to an end on a Thanksgiving eve when they hit a bank and were tracked by the electronic tracers that authorities had placed amid the stacks of bills. Scurlock and his cohorts were being pursued by elements of the Seattle police and FBI, who engaged the trio in a shootout.
Scurlock managed to escape but was later confronted hiding in a neighborhood backyard camper. After police surrounded the camper, they heard a single shot – and responded by shooting some 76 holes into the camper. After a two-hour wait, they discovered that Scurlock had committed suicide.
Morse and Porges cover a lot in their film. They explain how Seattle’s booming tech-driven economy at the time made it ripe for bank heists, and they detail just how well the robbers managed to succeed even when hitting the same establishments repeatedly.
They interview a number of police officials and FBI agents – among them Seattle Police Department detective Mike Magan and FBI Special Agent Shawn Johnson – about how confounded they were that the man they labeled “Hollywood” managed to keep eluding them.
At the heart of the film, though, is Scurlock, the guy who earned his nickname because of the disguises he wore that smacked of such Hollywood action films as Michael Mann’s “Heat.” He is the same guy who emerged from a loving family, as his sister attests, to become a meth-making, college-dropout hippy living in a three-story tree house just outside Olympia.
Scurlock comes across as a cross between Robin Hood (he reportedly gave away much of his stolen loot to needy causes) and the thrill-seeking Bodhi character played by Patrick Swayze in the movie “Point Break.” At the same time, his diary entries betray a guy who slowly but surely began to become unmoored from reality.
At one point he wrote, “my mind is like an undisciplined child that’s gone wild.”
It seems only fitting, and symbolic, that a couple of years after his death, Scurlock’s tree house collapsed.