The Hurricane Heist (2018)
Thieves attempt a massive heist against the U.S.
Treasury as a Category 5 hurricane approaches one of its Mint
facilities.
Director:
Rob CohenStars:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
9 March 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Category 5 See more »Box Office
Budget:
$35,000,000 (estimated)Company Credits
Production Co:
When watching a disaster-thriller hybrid such as The Hurricane Heist, you can almost hear the bro-tastic Hollywood pitch sessions that spawned this kind of high-concept enterprise: “It’s Heat meets Twister!” “The Bank Job meets The Perfect Storm!” "Fast Five, but it’s set during Katrina!" "It’s Sharknado, but instead of sharks, there’s $600 million in cash and a bunch of actors speaking with questionable Southern accents!"
The latter probably comes closest to describing action veteran Rob Cohen’s dumb and mildly fun mashup, which has the xXx and The Fast and the Furious
director doing what he does best: making people, cars and various
inanimate objects come crashing together at extremely high velocities.
What he doesn’t do very well is concoct a good story or create
characters that resemble real people, which is why Heist can also be a bit of a chore.
Still, you’ve got to give Cohen some credit for staging an entire
movie against a backdrop of torrential rain and 150 mph winds, although
he should have invested more in a good script and less in all the
computer-generated pressure systems. Released in France a few weeks
before its U.S. rollout, Heist won’t score big at the box
office, though it may attract viewers who prefer to see their B-movies
on the big screen rather than on the cinematic dumping ground that has
become Netflix.
Written by Scott Windhauser and Jeff Dixon, from a story by Anthony J. Fingleton and Carlos Davis, Heist kicks
off with a traumatic incident that takes place in 1992, in which two
young Alabama brothers see their father crushed to death by a water
tower during Hurricane Andrew. It’s an event that will haunt them for
the rest of their lives — and just in case you didn’t get that, at the
end of the scene Cohen has a cluster of ominous storm clouds digitally
morph into a giant screaming skull.
25 years later, Dixie boys Will (British actor Toby Kebbell) and
Breeze (Australian actor Ryan Kwanten) have grown up to become polar
opposites. Will went to school and turned into a daredevil weather
expert (he has a “Ph.D. in synoptic meteorology”), while Breeze has
blossomed into a whiskey-guzzling womanizer who has taken over his dad’s
towing business. But when another superstorm (named Tammy) descends on
their fictional town of Gulfport, threatening to tear it apart, both of
them will be put on the same righteous path.
That’s one plotline. The other entails the robbery of $600 million in
greenbacks from a U.S. Treasury facility located just outside city
limits. How that happens requires a suspension of disbelief about as
powerful as Hurricane Sandy. To simplify things, let’s just say the
crime involves a pair of seriously goofy computer hackers (Ed Birch,
Melissa Bolona); a cellphone tower; machine guns that shoot poisoned
darts; an industrial paper shredder; and a crooked, shotgun-wielding
sheriff (Ben Cross) — although everything actually hinges, for some
reason, on a broken backup power generator.
The heist is masterminded by corrupt Treasury employee Perkins (Ralph
Ineson), who seems to have intricately thought out every single step —
including bringing a change of clothes so he can slip into a villainy
overcoat about halfway through the movie — yet somehow manages to lose
track of the one person who can thwart his plans: fellow agent Casey
(Maggie Grace, playing things straight), who will eventually team up
with Will to try and save the day.
As the characters converge and the tempest takes over, Cohen delivers
a few gonzo set pieces, most memorably a face-off at the center of town
where rip-roaring winds turn a pile of hubcaps into weapons of mass
destruction. Otherwise, Casey and Will seem to have an awful lot of time
to drive around and recite their traumatic backstories (how big,
exactly, is Gulfport?), though whatever sparks fly between them are
quickly put out when the levee breaks and the whole shebang gets flooded
over.
In the last act, over-the-top digital effects blow away any vague remnant of verisimilitude that Heist
tried to establish, with a closing chase sequence that has the
hurricane surrounding our heroes like the Jell-O molded Red Sea in Cecil
B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. There’s a point in many movies where the CGI crosses the credibility line and there’s no turning back. In The Hurricane Heist, that pretty much happens in the first scene, but the finale is just too ridiculous to swallow.
Tech credits are nonetheless accomplished for a purported $35 million
budget, with locations in Bulgaria doing a decent job standing in for
parts of coastal Alabama. Dialogue tends toward the eye-rolling variety
and performances feel uneven across the board, with the actors using a
menagerie of accents, including some dubious Deep South ones, as they
shout above all the pounding rain and thunder.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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