Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger — Another gleeful underdog saga

Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); Unrated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

Back in 2023, director Chris Foggin’s delightful Bank of Dave depicted how England’s Dave Fishwick rose from a working-class bloke who parlayed his one-man car repair shop into Britain’s largest minibus supplier, and then — enraged by what the 2008 financial crisis did to ordinary folks — set up his own lending company.

 

After Dave Fishwick (Rory Kinnear, foreground) publicizes the predatory tactics of payday
lenders, they fight back in a way that drags him into court and threatens the existence of
his bank. His colleagues — from left, David (Pearce Quigley), Oliver (Amit Shah) and
Jessica (Chrissy Metz) — offer words of encouragement.

He vowed to do what bank CEOs had forgotten or ignored: to help people and do no harm.

Scripters Piers Ashworth and Clare Keogh shaded some events — it was a film, not a documentary — but the core jaw-dropping details were accurate. (Channel 4’s actual 2012 documentary is readily available via YouTube.)

 

But Fishwick wasn’t finished.

 

Foggin and Ashworth are back, with the just-released Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger, which delivers an equally entertaining and provocative account of what Fishwick did starting in 2013, after learning that some of his customers were being bled dry by the usurious interest charged by payday lending firms.

 

(We’re warned, as was the case with the first film, that this one’s narrative is “true-ish” at best.)

 

Rory Kinnear and Jo Hartley return as Dave and his wife, Nicky, who make the perfect team. Events kick off quickly, when — during a chat show — Dave hears from a caller who is being buried beneath crippling interest rates on a payday loan. 

 

He’s stunned to discover that the British government has done nothing about this predatory business model. Dave then allies himself with Oliver (Amit Shah), a Citizen’s Advice & Law Center counsellor who can lead him to numerous victims. 

 

But unlike Dave’s earlier battle, which was limited to British entities, he and Oliver learn that the two largest payday offenders — dubbed Quickdough and Snapcash Advance — are overseen by a dodgy wealthy American named Carlo Mancini (Rob Delaney). This prompts Dave to cajole Jessica (Chrissy Metz), a New York-based financial journalist, into joining them in his Lancashire home town of Burnley.

 

Their subsequent crusade runs into serious roadblocks. None of the victims is willing to testify in court, for fear of being slapped with even higher interest rates. And while interviewing such folks, Dave learns that both operations are run solely online ... meaning that there’s no physical place for borrowers to pay back in cash, even if they have the necessary amount.

 

That really annoys him ... but it also prompts the ingenious manner with which he decides to channel public outrage, social media being more of a force than it was, back in 2008.

Eddie the Eagle: Truly soars

Eddie the Eagle (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for mildly suggestive material and partial nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.26.16

Winning isn’t everything.

Sometimes merely participating, and doing your best, is enough. More than enough.

When Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman, left) finally, reluctantly, agrees to help train wannabe
ski-jumper Michael "Eddie" Edwards (Taron Egerton), the task proves an uphill challenge
for a young man with no athletic grace whatsoever.

We tend to forget, after the increasingly overblown sequels, that in his 1976 film debut, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa merely wanted to “go the distance.” And that’s all he did, which is — in great part — what makes that film such an endearing classic.

British director Dexter Fletcher’s charming Eddie the Eagle is cut from the same cloth. This whimsical underdog saga is fueled by an engaging performance from Taron Egerton, superbly cast as Michael “Eddie” Edwards, the wannabe British ski-jumper who made such an improbable — and improbably triumphant — showing at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

An opening statement is careful to note that this big-screen account of Edwards’ exploits is “inspired” by actual events, which allows scripters Simon Kelton and Sean Macaulay to play fast and loose with a few details. They’re careful to retain the essential broad strokes that brought Edwards to Calgary, and of course his performance at the Olympics is a matter of record (and can be viewed in any number of YouTube videos).

But various supporting characters have been conflated or invented outright, in the manner we’d expect from a crowd-pleasing, feel-good movie. That’s less of an issue in this particular case, as such liberties merely augment the myth-making that put Edwards in the history books. Somehow, it feels appropriate.

Besides which, when the result is this enjoyable, it’s hard to complain.

We meet young Eddie as the bespectacled only child of working-class Cheltenham parents Janette (Jo Hartley) and Terry (Keith Allen), the latter a construction plasterer by trade. Despite poor vision, worse knees — the boy is shackled into a leg brace — and an utter lack of coordination, Eddie lives and breathes a foolish notion of growing up to become an Olympian.

Fletcher brings us through Eddie’s childhood with a brief prologue that highlights the boy’s stubborn pluck, much to the delight of his doting mother, and the exasperation of his aggrieved father. Hartley and Allen are delightful: She’s the mum we’d all love to have, while Allen — all bluster and bluff — makes ample use of his busy background as a popular character actor.

And how can we not adore a child who believes that holding his breath underwater for not quite a minute will qualify for some obscure Olympic event?