Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger came to Netflix towards the end of last week, and has spent most of the time since at the top of the streaming platform’s UK films chart. This makes sense – the true story of Dave Fishwick, as (very, very loosely) adapted first for 2023’s Bank of Dave and now for its 2025 sequel, is a remarkable one.
After leaving school at sixteen with no qualifications, he set up what would grow into the UK’s largest minibus supplier, and became a millionaire. Then, in 2011, having noticed how hard it now was for people to borrow money from high street banks in the wake of the financial crisis, he stepped in to fill the gap, lending his own money to people at decent and transparent interest rates. Finding that his modest rates meant they were all able to pay him back, he used a crowdfunding model to set up his own bank on his local high street – Burnley Savings and Loans, aka The Bank of Dave. It’s wedged between an optician and a pharmacy, and a sign in its window boasts how many years it’s been open.
This story forms the basis of the 2023 film. The recent sequel focuses on Dave’s next target – payday loans companies (think Wonga, QuickQuid, Sunny etc), whose transparently exploitative practices and astronomical interest rates frequently put financially desperate people in even more desperate situations. Fishwick decides to step in and take on the debts of people who have fallen foul of the payday lenders, trusting them to pay him back at his own, more reasonable rates while he takes on the lenders and exposes their predation.
You’d think this story wouldn’t need much embellishment for its film adaptation. Indeed, a short documentary which came to Netflix today – Dave Fishwick: Loan Ranger – is evidence of as much. But it got it by the boatload anyway.
We open with Dave’s awakening to the horrors of the payday lender, which comes via a phone call to a radio show he’s appearing on where a woman asks how much she’d owe in a year if she borrowed £200 off him, before telling him that, having borrowed that amount from a payday lender, she now owes £1480. “Hang on,” baffles Dave, “you’re telling me they’ve charged you –” here we’re allowed a moment to observe the turning of cogs – “6000 per cent interest? That’s bloody criminal, that is!” And our hero has his mission.
The film’s initial crime is just laying it on this thick – these people are sad because the nasty company is bad, it tells us, over and over again. Then it gets ridiculous. I won’t go into spoilers in case you still want to watch it (please don’t), but lowlights include a wholly unnecessary romance featuring a New Yorker who claims to miss Burnley on the basis of a perhaps week-long visit, and a heist-y escape from some apparently actually life-threatening danger facilitated by none other than actual Def Leppard. It’s like the real story’s been passed through the filter of the child who tells his classmates he fought a dragon at the weekend.
What’s most frustrating is that it doesn’t need to do this. These people are sad, because the nasty company is bad. The reality of the payday lenders’ practices already pushes the limits of credibility, and it’s real. In the documentary, Dave Fishwick: Loan Ranger, we get a version of events that might not have the glamour afforded by a big Netflix budget, but which is firmly rooted in reality, and all the better for it.
We get more detail on the actual practices of the companies, like the fact that they were encouraged to lend to people who were unlikely to be able to pay them back, because the longer it takes someone to repay their debt, the more they owe the company. We also hear from a former employee of a payday lender who reveals she was told to target unemployed people when giving out leaflets, and got bonuses when people she’d lent to went further into debt.
We get a more rounded and therefore relatable and likeable version of Dave, whose exclaimed “bastards!”, re the lenders, is so much more meaningful, more invigoratingly venomous, than his polished “so you’re telling me…” comprehensions of their practices in the film. And he isn’t idolised – when a representative from the lenders accuses him of oversimplifying things, he says he often does, because it helps him understand things better. Me too, Dave. Me too.
He chats to people – “hello!” to some builders, “it’s posh round ‘ere!” to a stranger in leafy Hampstead – far more organically than his scripted character self, and seeing this in the documentary shows us not just that Dave is friendly, but that he’s defiantly so – his chatting is a political act that reflects and furthers his insistence that you should always be able to talk to the people you owe money to – be they banks, payday lenders, or Dave.
The film, at the other end of the subtlety spectrum, literally has a character at one point ask, “so, what are the stakes here, eh?” and then spell out the stakes. It has a visiting American journalist observe of Burnley that “you people really love your hometown, huh?” It features more variations of “a payday whatnow?” than I care to count.
The documentary isn't perfect – it's a short, visibly low-budget account of a man getting angry at some big companies. But that's kind of the whole thing with Dave – he's just a normal bloke who's done quite well for himself and decided that others deserve the chance to do the same. He doesn't need Def Leppard or Netflix or any of the fictional bells and whistles they insist on attaching to him. As the film won't let us forget for a second, he's just Dave from Burnley.
