A film that is far less than the sum of its parts.
By Adam DiLeo
Heist (no relation to the 2001 David Mamet film) appears on the surface to combine Ocean’s Eleven with Speed, which is to say it features a casino robbery and a hostage situation on a moving bus. Though there’s no way it could match the cleverness of Ocean’s or the thrills of Speed, it’s almost as if the filmmakers were hoping to crib enough plot points and visual cues to get those classics mentioned in any review of their movie. Mission accomplished though the comparisons are predictably unfavorable.
The problems with Heist become apparent almost immediately. After a startlingly violent intro, we meet our players. There’s a sadistic enforcer named Derek (Morris Chestnut) though he is listed in the credits as Dog. (I can’t remember anyone calling him that, thank goodness.) Derek/Dog works for Pope (Robert De Niro), a riverboat casino owner who nearly misses his own retirement party so he can personally oversee the torture and murder of two small time thieves.
In the other corner we have Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the beleaguered father of a sick child on the verge of being evicted from her hospital bed. Vaughn lacks the capital to continue paying for an unspecified but crucial treatment, the discontinuance of which will not only worsen his daughter’s health but also cause her to lose her spot on the waiting list for kind of some miracle surgery. Precisely no time is spent justifying this extreme set up. Just go with it, screenwriter Stephen Cyrus Sepher seems to say. We’ve only got 90 minutes here.
Vaughn asks his boss Pope, with whom he has a history, if he can, you know, borrow like $300,000 to save his dying daughter. Pope expresses his sympathy for a nanosecond before kicking Vaughn out. For good measure Derek throws him a beating and fires him. That’s the sort of polar extremes Heist is selling. Vaughn is sympathetic, everyone else is insane and cartoonishly cruel.
So Vaughn turns to crime, joining in a scheme hatched by a security guard named Cox (Dave Bautista). With about two minutes of planning on a diner tabletop (“Why do I have to be the pepper?”) they’re able to break into the casino and clean out Pope’s vault. They make off with the cash but have to hijack a bus full of commuters to get away. (See? Just like Speed!)
One of Heist’s very few selling points, perhaps the only one, is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He’s on screen for nearly the entire movie and he holds it all together beautifully. His doleful puppy dog eyes and weary baritone make him easy to care about. He’s also just about the only character who seems smart and tough enough to pull this caper off. He displays the gravity and effortless confidence of someone who can think his way out of most situations and shoot his way out of the rest.
The remainder of the cast is pretty dreadful. There’s Gina Carano as do-gooder police office Bajos (a name that should have been re-examined once it became clear it sounds exactly like Officer Bowels). Carano gives her most wooden performance to date, adding nothing to the drama except a brief, studio-mandated throw down with Bautista, who likewise proves unable to convey complex thought. Whether or not you liked him as Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, in that movie his motivations were clear and the parameters of his personality defined. In Heist, he’s supposed to start off as a cool customer who unravels before our eyes as his control over the situation becomes increasingly unstable. Bautista isn’t able to relay this psychological breakdown. He just curses louder and more frequently.
De Niro is De Niro, which is to say he’s still a unique presence even when he’s phoning it in. One can hardly blame director Scott Mann for not having better control over an actor of De Niro’s magnitude, especially when he’s hired to play an archetype he practically invented. While he appears visibly bored at times, sucking relentlessly on a green-tipped e-cigarette, even at 10% De Niro can act circles around most of his castmates, so that’s something.
Gina Carano in Heist.
If you’ve seen the poster for Heist you might think Kate Bosworth is a main character. The truth is she’s in exactly one scene, which is supposed to be a turning point for Pope. Instead of marking a watershed moment for the character, he exits the scene much the same way he entered, albeit somewhat grumpier. As a result, when his character does finally show hints of evolution later on, it feels forced and sudden.
Heist asks a lot. It hopes audiences will be drawn in by similarities to movies like Ocean’s Eleven, Speed, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and Dog Day Afternoon, without noticing how vastly inferior and less interesting it is. It wants you to believe that four random yahoos with no special skills can defeat a casino security system by tripping a few circuit breakers. It wants you to ignore logical problems like how a bus full of hostages can be the center of the biggest news story of the year one second and utterly isolated from the media the next. It definitely wants you to look away from the obvious twist ending that’s as about as hard to spot as a slowing moving bus.
I’m pretty sure it even wants you to think Texas and Alabama share a border. Most of all, it needs you to please ignore how the righteous hero’s plan to save his daughter gets about a dozen other people killed on its way to an absurdly consequence-free conclusion.
Heist is in theaters and on VOD on November 13.
Heist hangs together almost entirely on Morgan’s charm and dogged determination. Without him, this movie would be unwatchable. As it is, it’s an excuse to trot out a fun but worn premise, shoot a bunch of guns and, eventually, crash a bus. Movies with gunfights and bus crashes are fairly cool, so in that regard this one is okay. Just don’t go in expecting clever storytelling, polished directing or three-dimensional characters.
