“The Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist”, the robbery of an Argentine bank on Netflix

Productions based on real events is one of Netflix's strengths. The platform has movies, series and documentaries that recount events taken directly from reality. Within this vast Netflix offer, there are more and more Latin American productions that follow this line. Among them, the Chilean series “42 Days of Darkness”, inspired by the disappearance of Viviana Haeger in 2010; or the Argentine documentary The Photographer and the Postman", which focuses on the murder of a photojournalist that shocked Argentine society and whose case involved businessmen, police forces and political figures at the end of the 90s.

One of the streaming giant's latest productions in this genre is "The Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist." There are heists whose spectacularity and ingenuity immediately inscribes them in history. The robbery at Banco Río de Acassuso in Buenos Aires in 2006 is one of them. The documentary tells step by step how the plan was devised and executed. The most outstanding aspect of the production is that everything is narrated by the men who carried out the crime.

The reconstruction of the heist

On the morning of January 13th, 2006, armed individuals entered the Banco Río de Acassuso in Buenos Aires. In an instant, they take control of the entity and take several hostages. Police forces quickly surround the scene and negotiations begin, which go on for hours. When the special forces prepare to enter the bank and confront the captors, they only find the hostages. The criminals have vanished and they have taken a lot of loot. What seemed like an express robbery that had gone wrong was actually a strategy to deceive the authorities while the criminals fulfilled their true purpose: looting the bank's safe deposit boxes at will. By the time the officers realized this, the robbers had left and the only thing they left behind was the message: "In a rich neighborhood, without weapons or grudges, it's just money and not love."

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How did these men manage to execute this plan so precisely and then vanish? This is what the documentary tells us. In it, Fernando Araujo, Mario Vitette Sellanes, Rubén Beto de la Torre and Sebastián García Bolster, perpetrators of the crime, declare that they not only recount what happened in the first person, but also recreate the situations of the robbery.

That the story is told in the first person by its perpetrators makes this title quite interesting. It provides a whole new perspective on an event widely documented in newsreels, investigative books, and film adaptations.

This is a production that takes us into the motivations of a group of individuals to rob a bank. The interviewees agree in labeling that criminal event as an adventure. The documentary offers us a glimpse into the psyche and machinations of those who forged in detail a plan that allowed them to outwit the authorities, loot several boxes from a bank and then disappear.

In the documentary we find out how the plan matured. We see how experts from various areas were recruited, the path of access and escape were outlined, the responsibilities of each one established and, ultimately, how they devised a strategy in which very little was left to chance.

"The Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist"  is an interesting documentary, with a very good pace and that manages to entertain from start to finish. Its best part is where the robbery is recreated. At this point, they also relate their experience, bank employees, customers and even police officers involved in the case. Without a doubt, it can be said that this is a title worth seeing.