Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How to Rob a Bank’ on Netflix, a gripping documentary about a notorious 1990s bank-robbery spree (2024)

Let it be known that How to Rob a Bank (now on Netflix) is not an instructional video, but a curious title for one hell of a true-crime documentary. Directors Stephen Robert Morse (producer of Amanda Knox) and Seth Porges (Class Action Park) piece together a rousing narrative about the bank robber dubbed “Hollywood,” who knocked over Seattle banks between 1992-96, and made off with more than $2 million. That nickname is certainly apt, as the thief, Scott Scurlock, was inspired by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi character in Point Break to commit the crimes, and ended up at the center of a saga worthy of the silver screen.

HOW TO ROB A BANK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Animated storyboards shift to reenactments of a man in a ball cap, wig, sunglasses, mustache and wads of facial putty walking into a bank, waving a gun around and making off with a duffle bag full of cash. He was Hollywood, so dubbed by the FBI because of that ludicrous disguise – which apparently worked pretty well, because he’s one of the most prolific bank robbers ever in the U.S. We meet Ellen Glasser, head of the FBI task force assigned to the Hollywood case, and FBI agent Shawn Johnson and Seattle police detective Mike Magan, who led the investigation. Seattle journalists paint a contextual picture of a town suddenly flooded with money from booming Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks business, with banks stuffed with cash on every corner – which not only saw a marked increase in robberies, but created a Robin Hood narrative around this particular crook, who never hurt anybody – physically at least; mentally was surely another matter – and took money from fat corporations so he could give some of it to environmental groups and friends in need. “There may have been some people rooting for him,” one journalist quips.

But of course, the truth isn’t so cut-and-dried. We meet several people from Hollywood’s orbit, people who knew him as Scott Scurlock, a free-spirit type who built an impressive treehouse in a remote forest by hand, and lived there, writing in his diary and, as home-camcorder footage shows all too well, parading around his finely toned body sans clothing. Steve Meyers and Mark Biggins are the most notable talking heads here, since they were Scurlock’s accomplices in the robberies. They helped him maintain the treehouse and lived there; they describe him as someone with an adventurous spirit, and we see Scurlock ziplining down a rope 60 feet above the ground, without a harness. How did Scurlock pay for this awesome place? Cooking meth, of course. He had a promising pre-med education in college until he got caught cooking up in the campus lab, and was booted out of school milliseconds before graduation.

That endeavor lasted until Scurlock’s meth contact was murdered. Then he saw Point Break and was inspired to heist banks – it seemed easy to him. And it was, but not at first, as he and Biggins stumbled through their first one like oafs, but still scored a few bills shy of $20k. Then Scurlock was inspired to don facial prosthetics, and began planning the robberies in great detail, meticulously casing the banks and striking at opportune times. He and Meyers consulted with an insider who worked as a bank teller, which opened the door to how they could manipulate employees and gain access to vaults, and their scores got bigger – robbery no. 4 netted them more than $250k.

As Scurlock began stacking robberies behind him, the authorities worked diligently but were always a few steps behind him. The FBI blew up the story in the media, dubbing him Hollywood and offering rewards. So Scurlock upped his game to be more unpredictable, racking up 14 robberies, with the cops showing up just in time to grasp at thin air. But Scurlock’s happy-hippie-ish personality began submerging into darkness, and we get glimpses of this in the diary entries shared here. Scurlock and Meyers went to the movies and watched Heat, and were spooked – was this robbery and deadly shootout their ultimate fate? So they planned one last big one before they’d call it quits.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Vjeran Tomic: The Spider-Man of Paris is a similarly fast-paced, fascinating character study of a skilled criminal, with first-person commentary from those who committed the crimes.

Performance Worth Watching: The one voice we don’t hear is Scurlock’s but his presence is ultimately what draws us into the movie.

Memorable Dialogue: Meyers, a sculptor who previously worked in the art biz: “Doing what Scott and I did was the most creative thing I’ve ever done in my life, much more than the art world.”

Sex and Skin: Welp, there’s Scurlock’s schlong in some blurry old footage.

Our Take: OK, quick inventory: We have Scurlock’s pals who were in the banks and getaway cars and are either emerging after the statute of limitations passed or are on the other side of a prison sentence. We have his sister and some friends who had no idea who their sibling/compadre really was. We have the cops on the case who ended up chasi- well, let’s not spoil it for anyone unfamiliar with this saga, so they can be held in tight suspense by How to Rob a Bank, riveted to the screen as if it were a tense, skillfully assembled and action-packed feature film. But where is Scurlock? What was his fate?

You’ll hang on to find out, but in the meantime, Morse and Porges – using talking heads, reenactments, and cleverly designed animations made to look like film storyboards, and most importantly, generally avoiding true-crime cliches – dig into Scurlock’s character, tapping into the allure of his little cult of personality. He’s a magnetic figure, a lover of nature with wild Mel Gibson hair and big eyes. His friends say they were compelled to “not disappoint” him, so they participated in his crimes – the mark of a persuasive and possibly manipulative man with vision, for better or worse. He comes off as a charismatic, complicated anti-hero the likes of which we’ve seen in many Hollywood films, a character who leaves us conflicted, because we want to root for him in spite of his terrible misdeeds; the film tosses in some stuff at the end that attempts to reckon with the psychological damage he caused, but it’s ultimately more fascinated with the crook than the fallout. The fact that his voice isn’t in the film only amplifies the mystery of who he is and what his motivation was.

But ultimately, this isn’t a Hollywood story. It taps into the gray areas and uncertainties of human psychology, exploring how a life of crime is not a life of exoneration from the average person’s burdens. Scurlock wrote in his diary of his malaise, how he wondered if he only “wants to want,” which is a path with no end, a life with no goal. That’s the grimness we don’t see in gangster tales and other movies that spray an entertaining shellac atop human horrors. How to Rob a Bank’s ability to explore a number of compelling ideas in a tense, economic fashion renders it one of the best documentaries in recent memory.

Our Call: How to Rob a Bank is top-to-bottom excellent. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.