After successfully setting up a community bank in his hometown of Burnley, Dave Fishwick (Rory Kinnear) turns his attention to a new challenge: targeting predatory payday lenders.
You don’t often hear the phrases “feel-good” and “Financial Conduct Authority” in the same sentence. But 2023’s Bank of Dave was as good as they come, telling the “real” story of David Fishwick (played by Rory Kinnear), a businessman and Burnley bloke who defied odds and financial regulators to open a charity. Community bank for his fellow Lancastrians. Emotional and sugary though it was, it was a heart-warming Brit flick in the classic mold — banking-based brass-off, the Full Monty of the financial sector. Plus, it had a climactic cameo from the band Def Leppard for some reason.
Now Dave is back, in this latest fictional tale in his BAFTA-winning Channel 4 documentary series, Chris Faughan is back in the director’s chair. With the coalition Lib-Con government in despair, the sting of the 2007-08 recession still lingering, and the scourge of wage debt has suddenly begun to drain the pockets of thousands of ordinary working people. Dave – now a minor celebrity, and on a media blitz – learns the true scale of the problem from a radio call-in when a pensioner named Mavis shares her story. It is, she says to her shock, “like a plague”, people being driven into poverty by an unregulated lending industry.
The fact that this exhibition is set to the tune of R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ should tell you that this is not exactly groundbreaking filmmaking. “You’re a common man, standing up to corruption, standing up for common people,” his wife Nicola (Jo Hartley) assures him at one point. Like the first film, Piers Ashworth’s script hammers home its well-meaning message with the subtlety of a Lancashire hotpot. And like the original, it makes little attempt to feel particularly grand or cinematic, seemingly deciding that a small-town story demands only a modest aesthetic.
But by God, it remains a powerful force to feel, powered in large part by the almighty piston of Rory Kinnear’s brilliant, charismatic performance. His Dave combines the everyman charm of Wallace and Gromit (“Christmas blood pudding!”) with the finely tuned moral compass of George Bailey (you almost expect him to say, “Merry Christmas, you’re so good. Old building and debt!”). Kinnear is just a truly great value. It’s not hard to picture yourself joining his little man’s cause.
This time, Dave is effectively an activist and campaigner, finding himself in a grand courtroom, like a combination of A Few Good Men and My Cousin Vinny (two films Dave himself has referenced). There’s very little tension in either of these films: you can guess how it’s all going to go down. And once again, it ends with a somewhat surprising Def Leppard gig, with the dad rockers playing a surprisingly important role in the plot. But it’s all in the service of making you feel good — and an important, real-life one. With Robin Hood point. And you can take it to the bank.
It seems like you’re referencing a title, “Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger.” While there isn’t an official release or major information about a sequel to the 2023 film Bank of Dave, it seems like this could be a fun play on words or a concept for a continuation of the story.
Bank of Dave is based on the true story of Dave Fishwick, a businessman who set up a community bank to help local people in Burnley, England. It combined elements of drama and comedy, exploring Dave’s fight against financial institutions to offer better lending rates to regular people.
A potential Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger might continue that story, perhaps with Dave taking on new challenges in the world of finance, and the title seems like a lighthearted, western-inspired take on his efforts. What do you think? Would you want to see a continuation like that?
More unmistakably a crowd-pleaser, Burnley-based Ambulance, which arrives at its unmistakably virtuous message – and a brilliant performance from the ever-reliable Rory Kinnear.