Directed by the British film-maker who made the recent cockney gangland drama 44 Inch Chest, Henry's Crime has the same basic plot as Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks, which, in turn, drew on Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League. A dimwitted toll booth clerk (Keanu Reeves) in upstate New York is jailed after taking the rap for a bank robbery staged by an old school friend and comes out determined to rob the same Buffalo bank. For this, he recruits an old lag (James Caan) he meets inside and an unreliable thickhead who survived the earlier heist. The plan is to use a tunnel dug by bootleggers during prohibition, which reaches from a changing room in the theatre next door to the bank vault.

No effort is made to conceal his plans either from the bank's security man who made the arrest five years earlier or from the leading actress (the formidably sexy Vera Farmiga), who's busy rehearsing the role of Madame Ranevsky in the theatre's forthcoming production of The Cherry Orchard. There's a certain ingenuity in the way the plot of Chekhov's play becomes interwoven with the robbery, but for the most part the producers seem to be aiming at, and almost achieving, MFI – maximum feasible implausibility.