Sunday, September 9, 2012

XIII - The Bank Job


XIII (Stuart Townsend) follows former Director of the CIA Frank Giordino (Paulino Nunes) to Moscow where he is trying to retrieve his box of dirty little secrets in an FSB controlled bank before regrouping and figuring out his next move. To get to Giordino's burn box first XII and Agent Jones (Aisha Tyler) recruit a Federally imprisoned safe-cracker (Nicholas Campbell) and their favorite genius computer hacker (Aaron Ashmore) for a government approved bank robbery in Russia.

While Giordino makes an unconventional trip to Russia to make contact with the head of the FSB (Stephen Bogaert), XIII and his team stage a break-in of the bank vault and retrieve Giordino's secrets. After copying everything in the box the team sits back to see what sensitive information Giordino goes for when he shows up early with the entire FSB on his tail after murdering his Russian counterpart.

"The Bank Job" certainly isn't the show's most subtle episode of the season, in much the same way Giordino has become a far simpler villain now that he's on the run, but there's plenty of action and humor to make up for it. It's good to see Ashmore return, and the back-and-forth between the young hacker with the senior citizen bank robber provides nice balance to the tension of the heist. The episode also lays the groundwork for XIII's distrust of President Carrington (Stephen McHattie) and gives XIII a few new mysteries given the encoded document and the mysterious blood tests found in Giordino's box.

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