The Hurricane Heist is a title that makes seeing a trailer or reading a plot description unnecessary. You know basically everything you need to about this movie just from reading its name. And, indeed, it is not false advertising. It is about a heist that takes place during a hurricane. It is not about story, character or dialogue. But hey, if you want to watch a bunch of trucks trying to outrun a natural disaster, you have come to the right place!
But I’m going to try to describe the story anyway. The plot, such as it is, is this: treasury agent Casey (Maggie Grace, Shannon from Lost and Liam Neeson’s daughter in the Taken movies) and her partner, Perkins (Ralph Ineson), are dropping off truckloads of old money to a United States mint facility in Alabama for it to be shredded. Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell, from the recent Planet of the Apes series) is a meteorologist tracking a massive hurricane that is coming to that area. When the reserve is taken over by armed gunmen, Casey teams up with Will and his estranged brother, Breeze (Ryan Kwanten, Jason from HBO’s True Blood), to stop the heist and survive the storm.
None of that is actually important. The characters and story are extremely thin and the dialogue is cheesy and obvious. But the action is actually relatively well conceived.
The director of The Hurricane Heist is Rob Cohen (director of the first films in the XXX and The Fast and the Furious franchises) and he certainly knows his way around an action scene. There are a few chase scenes that take place in severe weather that are pretty good and a couple of decent shootouts. I never cared about what was going on, but the action in and of itself was actually okay. If they had taken the same care with the rest of the film, it may have been a passable popcorn movie. But alas, it is not.
The Hurricane Heist (94 minutes without the end credits) is a bad movie, made well. The performances are irrelevant, since the dialogue is so poor that even the best actors would struggle to deliver it convincingly. However, Maggie Grace does the best she can at making her lines not so cringe inducing. The other actors do not fare quite as well, especially Kebbell and Ineson who have some truly awful lines that are just too difficult for them to sell.
The only thing The Hurricane Heist has going for it are some solidly executed action scenes and, let us be honest here, most wide-release action movies have solidly executed action scenes. They would have to be pretty remarkable to recommend a movie on that alone. Especially when the rest of it is this bad.
Films like this certainly have their fans. Though the movie is completely ridiculous in every way, sometimes it is nice to turn your brain off for a bit when you go to the theater. If the title The Hurricane Heist makes you excited, it is exactly what you think it will be. If the title The Hurricane Heist makes you roll your eyes, well, it is exactly what you think it will be, too.
1¼ out of 5
Cast:
Maggie Grace as Casey
Toby Kebbell as Will
Ryan Kwanten as Breeze
Ralph Ineson as Perkins
Directed by Rob Cohen
Screenplay by Jeff Dixon and Scott Windhauser
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