YMMV / Bandits

• Ho Yay: You gotta wonder just how many directions the movie's Love Triangle goes in, given that Joe and Terry are pretty much Heterosexual Life-Partners: the bank robbing edition.
• Magnificent Bastard: Joe Blake and Terry Collins break out of prison and embark on a bank robbery spree where they kidnap bank managers and their families the night before the robbery, merrily have dinner with their well-treated hostages, and make their hostages let them into the banks the next morning. Terry is good at long-term planning and logistical realities, while Joe excels at brilliant Refuge in Audacity Indy Ploys. The two manipulate and betray each other in escalating ways after falling in love with their hostage turned accomplice, Kate Wheeler, but ultimately get over these problems and reaffirm their bond. Even when they are cornered by the police and blame each other for this, it is all a deliberately staged show to publicly exonerate Kate and then fake their own deaths by using special effects to pretend they shot each other and wired their bodies with explosives. The two end up rich and retired in Mexico, in a polyamorous relationship with Kate, while the world assumes they are dead and sees them as folk heroes.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Cheri (Azura Skye) and Phil, the Makeout Kids who become the first people who Joe and Terry take prisoner but treat well. The way Cheri treats the event as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight and Phil makes a bumbling attempt to be a Badass Bystander help make their two scenes memorable.
  • Mildred, the Cool Old Lady bank manager. She is both the bank manager who does the most to defy the eponymous bandits and the manager who is the most amused and excited about being robbed by them.
• Values Resonance: Resolving the Love Triangle with a polyamorous relationship and treating it as a Happily Ever After was a unique take on the love triangle trope at the time, but with the rise of LGBT acceptance in the mainstream through the years since then, it is even more accepted by audiences today for it being positive representation of polyamorous people.

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