Apple TV Plus gets into the movie game with a historical finance caper starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson as 1950s entrepreneurs who had

‘The Banker’: Film Review

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2024-04-25 05:00:03

Apple TV Plus gets into the movie game with a historical finance caper starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson as 1950s entrepreneurs who had to become con artists to be players in the banking business.

“The Banker” is one of the rare movies centered on a bank that isn’t about robbing it. That doesn’t mean the film is short on scams or deceptions. Based on historic events that took place in the 1950s and ’60s, “The Banker” tells the true story of Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), a wily pair of African-American entrepreneurs who made themselves part of the real-estate game in Los Angeles, with the goal of getting rich (which they did) and, at the same time, of breaking the color line, making it possible for black citizens to move into formerly all-white neighborhoods.

Knowing that the real-estate business is the right arm of the banking business, the two sought to maneuver their way into the latter. Yet due to the color of their skin, they could barely get through the door. So they recruited a white man, a home-repair worker named Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult), to act as a front for them. They trained him to walk like a banker, talk like a banker, and think like a banker. That’s when the plot thickened.