IN THIS ECONOMY, "SET IT OFF" HAS NEVER LOOKED MORE TEMPTING

F. Gary Gray's 1996 heist film Set It Off begins with one woman getting fired from her bank teller job after being robbed at gunpoint, all because she happens to live in the same housing project as one of the suspects. Another debases herself in an attempt to secure funds for her brothers college tuition. A third loses custody of her kid when she's forced to take him to work with her and an accident transpires. And the fourth is a gay Black woman in 1990s America. Need I say more?

So when these four women start entertaining the idea of robbing a bank, I'm not exactly clutching my pearls. They're all facing the injustices of a society that's basically been set up for them to fail. And needless to say they've had enough. They're ready to set it off.

Watching it 30 years later, when rent is eating up my paychecks and a casual grocery run costs a down payment, a payment plan, and a kidney, even I, a certified wimp, had to admit it does look enticing. We're constantly being told that working harder, saving more, spending less, and picking up a side hustle (or three) will solve everything. So easy! But what if we had a slightly different approach to financial planning: skip the budgeting advice and go straight to where they keep the money.

I'm not saying they've got the answer. I'm just saying I'm willing to hear them out.

The only way we gonna see cash is if we take a bank.

The women in question are Frankie (Vivica A. Fox), Stony (Jada Pinkett Smith), Cleo (Queen Latifah), and T.T. (Kimberly Elise), four longtime friends living in Los Angeles. The foursome went to school together and they've lived in the hood their whole lives.

In the film's opening scene, Frankie is having a perfectly ordinary day at the bank when a familiar face appears at her teller window. It's a guy she knows from the projects, he's brought three friends with him and they've come to rob the place. He quietly demands that she empty her drawer, but Frankie, recognizing him, tries to talk some sense into him. He responds by shooting a woman standing nearby in the head.

Within seconds, the bank erupts into chaos. Bullets are flying, people are screaming, and by the time the shooting stops, three of the robbers are dead.

Frankie, shaken, covered in another woman's blood, is probably ready to go home and crawl into bed for a week. Instead, she's pulled in for questioning. A detective wants to know how she recognized the robber. And her employer decides she must've been involved and fires her while there's still blood on her clothes. They won't even clear her name after they uncover the truth, effectively shutting down any future she had in banking.

So now Frankie joins the other three girls, who all work at the same janitorial service, cleaning offices for Luther, an obnoxious little man who pays them next to nothing and acts like every dollar comes directly out of his personal retirement fund.

Stony, meanwhile, has spent years being more of a parent than a sister to her younger brother, Stevie. Their parents are gone, and she's determined that he's going to college, even if she has to drag him across the graduation stage herself. She's working herself ragged at said cleaning company and side-hustling at a car dealership, where her sleazy other boss offers an advance in exchange for sex.

Stony agrees because she thinks the money will go toward Stevie's tuition. But before she can see any of those plans come to fruition, police mistake Stevie for the robbery suspect and shoot him dead. Just like that, the boy she's practically raised is gone, all because he had the same haircut as the robber.

T.T.'s story is probably the most infuriating. She can't afford childcare, so she brings her son along while she cleans offices. At some point, he gets into the cleaning supplies and accidentally drinks something dangerous. He survives, and by all measures, T.T. has been a good and caring mother, but while they're at the hospital, a CPS worker informs her that her son is being placed in state care until she can prove she's capable of adequately caring for him.

Cleo, comparatively, has had the least bad day. She's openly gay, in a healthy relationship with her girlfriend Ursula, and has been lovingly restoring the same classic car since she was in seventh grade. She's currently living in a garage, though, and despite all her stubborn confidence, she certainly wouldn't mind having a proper roof over her head.

And naturally, it's Cleo who introduces the idea of bank robbery.

Apparently, one of the guys from the neighborhood managed to walk away with $20,000 after the holdup. And once Cleo hears that figure, she starts doing some mental arithmetic. Frankie, who knows the inside of a bank better than any of them, can actually see how they'd pull it off. Stony and T.T. are less immediately convinced, but eventually everybody gets on board.

So, what's the procedure when you have a gun to your head?

Unlike other femme-crim films (that's female criminals, for anyone unfamiliar with the term I just made up), like Thelma & Louise, which uproots its heroines from their homes and sends them on the open road, Set It Off keeps its women in their element, observing their constant attempts to live a "normal" life, which in their case means exploitative, low-paying jobs, insensitive men, and so on.

There's a lot of emphasis placed on the psychological importance of the hood. It's not simply where these women live, but the entire architecture of who they are. There's an illuminating scene where Cleo tells Stony, whose sole motivation for robbing banks is to get out of the projects, "Where will I go? I belong in this hood." But, for Stony, the robberies are her way out.

After a few successful robberies, Stony walks into a bank to scope out a potential target. She leaves with a plan and a handsome bank professional's digits. Mr. Sexy, as I like to call him, is Keith (Blair Underwood), a suave, successful executive who gives Stony a window into the life she's always imagined for herself.

Keith has a beautiful home and the kind of money that allows him to enjoy life without constant worry. For Stony, spending time in his world makes a comfortable life feel less like some faraway fantasy and more like something she could actually have. What makes their relationship bittersweet is that at the end of each date, she still has to go home to her own reality.

But if working hard is supposed to be the ticket to a life like Keith's, the numbers aren't exactly cooperating. According to the latest Census pay data, Black women working full-time, year-round earned just 64 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men in 2025. That's actually down from 65 cents the year before. And in September 2026, the unemployment rate for Black women climbed to 6.8 percent. So we're apparently expected to work harder, earn less, get pushed out of entire industries, and somehow still have enough left over for a down payment. Sure, Jan.

The sad part is, the financial advice industrial complex would've had a field day with these women. Frankie needs to diversify her income streams. T.T. should probably look into remote work. Stony could use a passive income strategy. And Cleo? Well, perhaps the car isn't a financially responsible investment.

These days, anybody with a Shure mic and a brokerage account seems to have the secret to financial freedom. There's a masterclass to buy, a course to sign up for, and some finance bro promising to teach you how to make six figures while you sleep. For a limited time only, of course.

They ain't robbing banks, but I'd argue what they're doing is just as criminal: preying on exactly the kind of desperation that led these women to make the choices they did in the first place. Half of us are just desperate to find solutions. Unfortunately, the other half just as willing to sell them to us for a discount.

It ain't you I'm mad at.

Look, I want to make one thing clear, these women aren't #girlboss bossbabe sheros. They're criminals. In fact, here's a list of all the crimes they commit, from least to most bad:

• Run from the police.

• Steal several cars.

• Destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in city property.

• Steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from three separate banks.

• Threaten to shoot dozens of people.

• Threaten to kill a woman in an attempt to get information out of her.

• Threaten to kill a witness to a crime.

• Shoot at police officers.

• Kill a man after he steals their bank robbery money and refuses to tell them what he did with it.

• Shoot and kill a bank security guard.

  
  

That's a lot of bad stuff.

And yet, all I could do as the movie wound down toward the foursome's inevitable ruination was squint my eyes and wonder (mildly!) if I could get away with it, despite the fact that only 1 in 4 of these women do.

We spend an awful lot of time being told that the solution to not having enough money is to get exceptionally good at wanting less. What's wild is how ordinary the things the foursome is risking their lives for actually are. A proper roof over your head. A chance to raise your own kid. The freedom to live without a persistent, debilitating, daily struggle to get by. None of that should require a getaway car.

They say crime doesn't pay. But thirty years after Set It Off, honest work isn't exactly making a compelling case for itself, either.