n case you were somehow blissfully unaware, America is in a very dark place and Americans are not very happy about it. Last week's midterms saw a historic blue wave propelled by the high cost of living and the low trust in those making decisions, but restoring any small shred of faith in the system and any vague semblance of financial equity is still unlikely to come any time soon.

It's therefore theoretically ideal timing for films that provide some sort of rousing David v Goliath catharsis, a win on-screen when one feels entirely out of reach in real life. But like Paul Greengrass's muddy and muddled peasant revolt drama The Uprising which crashed and burned in September, David Leitch's How to Rob a Bank can't quite find a way to capture a moment that should be easy to capture. The director is best known for synthetic action films that prioritise noise above all else, from Deadpool 2 to Bullet Train to Hobbs & Shaw, a tonal through-line that could be most generously described as "annoying".

He's operating in a slightly less frenetic mode here (radically, people stop and sit down to talk in a number of scenes) but for a film that's supposed to enrage and excite and energise, it's all strangely, boringly flat and with a runtime just stretching past two hours, surprisingly sluggish too. It's a shame as there's an effectively startling premise that does initially grab: a group of masked criminals are playing both bank robbers and online activists by pulling off heists and telling their followers how to do the same. They're also playing Robin Hood by donating portions of their haul to local charities that need it the most.

The team is populated by Pittsburgh locals who have legitimate reasons to want to push back and rise up, all suffering from a "common pain", maddened by healthcare costs, immigration enforcement, military mistreatment and, naturally, predatory banks. Their leader is Ryan (a visibly bored Nicholas Hoult) who is joined by his partner, Emi (Shogun breakout Anna Sawai, given depressingly little to say or do) and friends Vince (Pete Davidson) and Hugo (Rhenzy Feliz). As their virality expands, an exhausted FBI agent "five years away from retirement" (John C Reilly) enlists a dubious house-arrested hacker (Zoë Kravitz) to take them down.

Like many a film focused so intently on the power of the internet, How to Rob a Bank was always going to feel almost instantly dated. Very few films about how we live digitally have managed this well (Ingrid Goes West remains an impressive outlier) but even taking this into consideration and allowing for certain shifts, there's something rather embarrassing here about what's viewed as current. The videos that are put out by the team would have felt passé a decade ago, a chintzy lolcat visual style that never once feels like anything but something a man made in his 50s would consider cutting edge. It doesn't help that the film also arrives after a summer of gen Z hits made by actual gen Z film-makers who know how to appeal with authenticity and one feels that getting someone in the room who actually understands what goes viral in 2026 would have been greatly beneficial. We barely get to hear much from the robbers for the most part, which might be a relief given how much we get to hear from Kravitz's creaky stoner stereotype. The actor, playing a dumbed down CBS sitcom riff on her Kimi character, arrives on-screen with a Cheeto in her hair (!) and it somehow gets worse from there – her quirks being that she "really likes good coffee" and just can't stop snacking or getting advice from her chatbot. The soundtrack is similarly out-of-step with The Hives's Tick Tick Boom and Lily Allen's Fuck You making one question just when the film is supposed to be set.

So for a film all about reflecting this awful moment that we're in, it never really feels like we're in this awful moment, just a loose idea of what it looks like from afar. Merely pointing at obvious targets does not count as social commentary, and while screenwriter Mark Bianculli does arguably have his heart in the right place (billionaires sure are bad!), it's a little hard to stomach an anti-capitalism screed not only funded by Amazon but featuring several scenes of lame, please-aim-logo-towards-camera, product placement (after one dismantles the system, a refreshing can of Mountain Dew really does hit the spot). The film wants to present as anarchic but it's as counter-culture and behind the times as an Occupy Wall Street bumper sticker on an SUV, a point most directly made when Reilly's FBI agent tells us that in all of this, it's actually the cops we should be pitying the most, just not the racist ones. OK, sure dad.

Its playschool politics might have been somewhat tolerated had there been much else here to enjoy, but the heist sequences are both smugly framed yet dimly thought through and there's never any remote emotional attachment to the group or real burning anger for what they are fighting for. Set It Off, a searing 1996 heist movie about four beaten down women taking charge, still carries more urgency and power in one scene than this does in the entire duration (Bianculli even cheekily lifts a shootout death from that film yet it carries over none of the impact). As the inevitable high-stakes last heist rears its head and as masked "anarchy" grips the streets of Pittsburgh, you'll be hard pressed to cheer any of it on. Fighting against the system can sure feel hopeless at times but it really shouldn't feel this pointless.

• How to Rob a Bank is in Australian cinemas on 12 November and in the US and UK on 13 November