The Bank Job (Lionsgate, $34.98)

One of the best reviewed movies of the first half of 2008, Roger Donaldson’s The Bank Job is a throwback to a classic ’60s or ’70s heist picture, where colorful characters come together to pull off a seemingly impossible robbery and barely get away clean. Jason Statham plays the ringleader Terry, who is lured into breaking into the Bank of England by Martine (Saffron Burrows). Assembling a crew of expert safecrackers, the gang gets the goods only to discover that they may have been set up by their own government. I won’t say anything more about the plot as the joy of any heist movie is watching the plan unfold in front of you. But for sheer style and entertainment value, The Bank Job is definitely the best movie you could rent (or buy) this week.

Extras: The Bank Job is available in single and two-disc editions, both of which share the same bonus features. The only difference with the two-disc version is that the second disc houses a digital copy of the movie you can download to your iTunes or PC desktop. Otherwise, the extras are all housed on the first disc and include a commentary track with Burrows and Donaldson, a making-of documentary, deleted scenes and a featurette about the real robbery that the film is loosely based on.

Birds of Prey: The Complete Series (Warner Bros., $39.98)

In the wake of Smallville‘s massive (and unexpected) success, the gone-but-not-forgotten WB network (currently still on your TV dial as The CW) launched several superhero themed series that either died soon after debuting (Tarzan) or never even made it onto the primetime schedule (Aquaman). The most successful of these failed Smallville clones was Birds of Prey and even that only managed to last 13 episodes before the network pulled the plug. Loosely based on the long-running DC Comics title, the show cast Ashley Scott (best known for frolicking in a bikini alongside Jessica Alba in Into the Blue) as The Huntress, the vigilante offspring of Batman and Catwoman, who patrols the streets of New Gotham some twenty years after her Mom was killed and her Bat-daddy vanished. In their absence, the Huntress has been in the care of Barbara Gordon (Dina Meyer), who fought alongside her parents as Batgirl until a run-in with the Joker left her in a wheelchair. Now she supervises Huntress’ excursions as the all-knowing Oracle, a computer whiz with the sleekest home office since Bill Gates. Rounding out the trio of birds is Dinah (Rachel Skarsten), a teenage runaway with psychic powers. Although the series featured solid production values and some fun cameos from classic Bat villains (including Harley Quinn and Lady Shiva), Birds of Prey never overcame inconsistent scripts and an uneven ensemble cast. But its nice to finally have the complete run available on DVD, if only for its novelty value.

Extras: Sadly, the studio didn’t try to reassemble members of the cast and crew for commentary tracks or a retrospective documentary. For some reason, they also declined to loop in some DC Comics folks to talk about the comic book that the series was based on. Instead, the only extras included here are the unaired pilot for Birds of Prey (which featured some different performers in key roles) and the first season of Gotham Girls, a series of web shorts made in the style of the seminal Batman animated series from the mid-’90s.

Penelope (Summit Entertainment, $25.99)

This long delayed Tim Burton-style fractured fairy tale isn’t as awful as its tortured road to the big screen might suggest. Originally filmed in 2006, Penelope, which tells the story of a girl (Christina Ricci) who grows up with a pig nose thanks to an ancient family curse, was picked up by The Weinstein Company and IFC Films, which then bounced it around their release schedule for over a year. After that, it found its way back to the open marketplace, where it was acquired by Summit Entertainment and given an ultra-brief theatrical release this past February. Now the film has finally arrived on DVD, where I expect it to attract a sizeable audience that will enjoy its modest charms. The cast deserves most of the credit for making the unlikely story work—Ricci is charming in the title role, Catherine O’Hara chews the scenery as Penelope’s frazzled mother, James McAvoy is suitably scruffy as her possibly traitorous suitor and Peter Dinklage brings his usual low-key hilarity to a small part as a tabloid journalist. My only real problem with the movie is that, even with a prosthetic pig snout on her face, Ricci is still a knockout, which makes it hard to accept that the mere sight of her would cause grown men to run for their lives. If the filmmakers really wanted to drive home the “looks don’t matter” message, perhaps they should have worked a little harder to make Ricci unattractive. That’s would be a tall order, I know, but sometimes beautiful people have to suffer for their art.
Extras: A fifteen-minute making-of featurette that very carefully avoids mentioning Penelope’s pre-release problems.

Step Up 2 The Streets (Disney, $34.99)

When the step-themed dance drama How She Move hit DVD a few weeks back, I promised to cover the impending release 2008′s other dance movie Step Up 2 The Streets, which skunked Move at the box office by a grand total of $58 million to $7 million. A lot of that has to do with the fact that Step Up is a Disney product, which is a marketing machine when it comes to teen and tween-friendly entertainment. The filmmakers were smart to align themselves with several of hip-hop’s brightest stars, including Missy Elliott and Flo Rida, both of whom contributed exclusive tracks to the flick. The cast is also Disney Channel-ready, from Briana Evigan to Zac Efron-clone Robert Hoffman to pop singer Cassie, cast here as the mean girl to Evigan’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks dancer, Andie. The generic plot finds Andie joining the Maryland School of the Arts, where she initially clashes with and then falls for golden boy Chase (Hoffman), who is eager to inject a little street cred into his dance routines. But Andie’s old friends from the block are none too happy about her “selling out” and kick her out of their dance troupe, leading her to form a new group with other MSA outcasts before the city’s big step competition. To How She Move‘s credit (and detriment), that movie tried to tell a more complex and emotional story, but, let’s face it—the audience turning up for these things is mainly interested in watching attractive teens flirt with each other while shake their tailfeathers on the dance floor. And on that level at least, Step Up 2 succeeds. Just don’t be surprised to find yourself chapter-skipping past all the talky bits to the dancing.

Extras: Director Jon Chu introduces about a half-hour’s worth of deleted scenes, which eliminate some fairly big plot points (such as Cassie’s betrayal of Andie to the school’s principal—guess her reps didn’t want her to come off as too much of a mean girl). Also included are no fewer than five music videos, an outtakes reel, a two-minute video pranks and two making-of featurettes.

Also on DVD
Based on Raven-Symoné’s popularity with the tween audience, I expected her first foray into feature film production to be an enormous success. Instead, College Road Trip (Disney, $29.99), which cast the That’s So Raven star as the college-bound daughter of an overprotective cop (Martin Lawrence), wound up earning a middling $43 million at the box office. That’s nothing to cry over of course, but I imagine Disney was hoping to make something in the area of $80-$100 million instead. The studio’s accountants can rest assured that the film will almost certainly earn that kind of coin on DVD, where family friendly movies really thrive. This single-disc edition comes with plenty of Raven-Symoné friendly extras, including her personal video diaries, a music video for her single “Double Dutch Bus” and a making-of featurette about that video. Elsewhere, horror fans have a quartet of titles to choose from this week, beginning with the photography-themed ghost story Shutter (20th Century Fox, $29.99), an American remake of a Thai film directed by a Japanese filmmaker (got that straight?). Joshua Jackson and Rachel Taylor play a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon in Japan, where they discover that a ghostly figure is haunting them through their pictures. The unrated cut comes with a commentary featuring Taylor and screenwriter Luke Dawson, seven featurettes and a handful of deleted scenes. The direct-to-DVD frightfest Steel Trap (Dimension Extreme, $19.97) traps a group of partygoers on the 27th floor of a high-rise, where they’re forced to participate in a bizarre series of party games in order to earn their freedom. As penance for making Snakes on a Plane, David R. Ellis’ new film Asylum (MGM, $26.98) is also going straight to disc. The plot involves a nubile college student discovering a horrifying truth behind her college dorm. Finally, Trapped Ashes (Lionsgate, $26.98) offers five short horror stories from such scary movie specialists as Gremlins‘ Joe Dante and the legendary British director Ken Russell. Extras include a five-part making of documentary and extended cuts of two of the films, “Stanley’s Girlfriend” and “Girl with the Golden Breasts.” In non-horror news, Lionsgate is also re-releasing Jamie Foxx’s 1999 comedy Held Up (Lionsgate, $9.99), in which the future Oscar winner played a convenience store hostage. Now where’s that special edition of Booty Call? For TV fans, Eureka: Season Two (Universal, $39.98) offers up all 13 episodes from the sophomore year of this Sci Fi Channel hit, which follows the misadventures of a small-town sheriff (the excellent Colin Ferguson) who has to serve and protect a community filled with accident-prone scientists. Finally, Robbie Coltrane: Incredible Britain (Acorn, $29.99) puts you in the driver’s seat alongside English comedian Robbie Coltrane as he escorts your around the Sceptred Isle in search of oddball eccentrics like rugby players who chase a beer keg around the pitch and a monster truck driver given to popping the occasional wheelie in his enormous vehicle.