Steven Boone joins SpoutBlog as a columnist covering politics and social issues and how they intersect with movies. Periodically, he’ll check in–as he’s done below–with firsthand accounts of watching movies with residents of a halfway house in Brooklyn.

A halfway house in East New York, Brooklyn. Spring, 2008. The male residents––ex-junkies, parolees and disability recipients––all gathered for their nightly movie ritual. Four to a room, two bunk beds, one cheapo DVD player and a 13-inch Coby TV set. Audio commentary provided by the audience of (on average) five men: two on the bunks, three hunched around the screen on milk crates. The core crew of film fanatics is Kid and Hef, two old-timer felons, each of whom could be mistaken for a black variation of Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo.

It’s a strange festival. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, Hoodlum, Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, The Bank Job, Why Did I Get Married?, Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters, and lots of TV-on-DVD: Annie Oakley, CSI, Boston Legal, ancient anime shows. No rhyme or reason in the selections, just whatever’s on hand from the $3 bootlegger or the public library.

But a festival theme emerges, a word hovering in the air unspoken during each screening: justice. Michael Clayton, about a corporate attorney (George Clooney) who finds himself at war with a corrupt, murderous agrochemical business, is plainly about justice for this audience so intimate with crime and punishment. Lots of “aw shits” and “hot damns.” If Michael Clayton is the Opening Night feature, then the festival centerpiece must be the heist flick The Bank Job. In this 1971-set gloss on a true story, gorgeous Saffron Burrows hires old flame Jason Statham to tunnel into a London vault. Unbeknownst to him, the bank contains dirty official secrets and inconvenient truths. She’s orchestrating the dirty work for some truly big wigs.

Statham makes the mistake of conscripting his inept friends (including a dumb-as-rocks male porn star) as accomplices. Everything goes wrong on the job, starting with a busybody CB radio enthusiast who intercepts the gang’s walkie-talkie transmissions and reports them to the bobbies (asshole). The halfway house audience is generally irritated: “Stupid fuckers,” Kid moans. “What they need radios for? Just go in there and get the motherfuckin loot!” Kid yanks off his flat-billed Yankees cap and slaps his Rocawear pants leg. (Toothless and graying, Kid otherwise looks like the boy he was whenever he went to prison: smooth-skinned and slim, eyes blazing.)

What’s worse, in the midst of drilling their way to the bank vault, the robbers take a break, ostensibly to avoid rousing the neighborhood with late night drilling, but more so that Statham and femme fatale Burrows can have a romantic interlude. More frustration when the gang lollygags inside the vault, as if there’s all the time in the world. “This is some dumb shit,” says Hef, so named because of his silk robes and the house cat who sticks to him like a Playmate.

The frustration eases a bit when Statham’s crew narrowly escapes the cops–only to return when the Stubbled One goes home and spills everything to his nagging wife. “I can’t believe this asshole,” says Kid. “Told the bitch everything. Why do fools always do this? She don’t need to know a thing. Let her in on that shit when you’re in the Caymans. I did jail bids for heedless motherfuckers like him.”

Ultimately, The Bank Job proves satisfying because it does deliver justice: The bigwigs thought they could evade a blackmail scheme involving sex photos of a royal family member by having Burrows steal them from the blackmailer’s safe deposit box. (The blackmailers are cartoon black militants with regal accents and wild Frederick Douglas beards. There’s a Black Panther-inflected American revolutionary and his Afro-Brit counterpart. The all-black and Latino audience doesn’t have much to say about this subplot, though everybody loves the scene where the American’s stirring speech about the joys of miscegeny make a big-bottomed white woman swoon right into his bed.)

The femme fatale plans to slink away with the photos, using the hunt for Statham’s robber gang as the perfect diversion. Instead, Statham gets wise to her scheme; he uses the royal gangbang pics and other state secrets uncovered in the vaults to “turn the tables on those dirty motherfuckers,” as Hef puts it. Statham also gets to display his triumph over The Man with a few of his patented martial arts moves–”that crazy Transporter shit,” says bootleg maven D, from a bottom bunk. Still, the authorities close in for the kill.

In a miraculous conclusion, Statham and one of his sad sack partners sit cuffed in the back of a squad car, resignedly awaiting their fate when the masterminds of the whole plot come along to set them free. This is a criminal’s fantasy: You’re sitting there in shackles, wondering how many years of pain and isolation lie ahead, and suddenly you’re free to go. For a brief moment, the powerful elite must pardon a presumed scumbag to avoid a scandal that would, by lowering royalty to the status of ordinary human beings, destroy a powerful insurer of the social order. Oh shit. The boys keep their freedom but lose the opportunity to blow a big, terroristic hole in the British elite’s true power, their sanctimonious grip on the public imagination. Sam Fuller would smile at the pulp symmetry, the tabloid fatalism.

But to Hef the film is an unambiguous triumph: “I like this movie cuz the bad guys got away.” The bruised irony in his voice on the phrase “bad guys” reflects the mood of gloomy cynicism the men have just been lifted out of. You see, earlier in the day, a judge acquitted three Queens police officers of murder after they put 19 bullets into an unarmed civilian, with the intention of leaving 50. Jason Statham has brought something like justice into the demoralized room.

Steven Boone is a native New Yorker whose film criticism and articles have been published in The Star-Ledger, The Village Voice, Time Out NY, RES and Show Business Weekly. He contributes to the blogs The House Next Door, Vinyl is Heavy and his neglected but beloved pet project, Big Media Vandalism.