Most critics faintly praised Roger Donaldson's half-true heist movie as an inoffensively cheery British caper. Me, I just wallowed in the meticulously recreated period detail.

The major talking point of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais's script is that the amateurish robbers who tunnelled into the vault of the Baker Street Lloyds Bank in 1971 were covertly sponsored by MI5 agents bent on recovering illicit sex snaps of Princess Margaret, stashed in a safe deposit box by a Caribbean crook as insurance.

I can't offer any insight into the truth or falsehood of this, but I can say that Donaldson's film perfectly captures the atmosphere, the look, even the colour palette of the early-Seventies London that I remember.

It's not just the cars and the clothes and the hairstyles, always the easiest signifiers of a decade to get right (and Donaldson has Jason Statham, Seventies man incarnate, as his none-too-bright protagonist, Terry Leather). Production designers Phil Harvey and Mark Scruton seem to have immersed themselves in the hues and sounds of the era, and its telling incidental details. You hear this in the insistent use of the old-style, ner-ner sirens of police cars and ambulance; see it in the beige, geometric-patterned curtains in the flat of the radio ham who overhears the robbers' walkie-talkie conversations and tips off the rozzers.

Then there are the smaller touches - the pint pots in the pubs, the fact that everyone smokes Rothmans and Senior Service and, at one point, a sighting in the background of a BRS Parcels lorry, that staple of every 1970s Blue Peter Appeal.

Even the soft body shapes in the obligatory strip-club scene look authentic, and I don't think it's an accident that David Suchet, as a porn baron, is made to look exactly like Ronnie Barker.

Although The Bank Job makes Seventies London look every bit as drab, sexist and racist as it was, it also makes one yearn for a time when the city was a simpler place; when thieves occupied lock-ups and dodgy car dealerships, when corrupt coppers were happy with a backhanded sheaf of fivers and what Suchet's character coyly calls "free oral sex".

Let's face it, one longs for a time when a royal involved in a sex scandal could be considered a matter of national security.