158. The Hurricane Heist; movie review

THE HURRICANE HEIST
Cert 12A
103 mins
BBFC advice: Contains moderate violence, threat, language, injury detail

Great special effects - shame about the lame storyline and wooden acting.
I wish I had £20 for every time I could have written that over the past seven and a half years.
The Hurricane Heist has so many failings that I could not fathom why Sky Cinema has claimed Rob Cohen's film as an 'exclusive'.
If it is going to grab some of Netflix' ground it will have to come up with movies which have much more substance than this.
Toby Kebbell stars as a meteorologist who is preparing for a storm even bigger than one which killed his father 25 years previously.
Meanwhile, Maggie Grace plays a high-level security officer who is guarding millions of dollars worth of cash which is destined to be shredded by the US Treasury.
The two find themselves in a battle against a criminal gang who have sussed out that the best time to carry out an audacious robbery is during a killer storm.
However, the combination of two determined adversaries and the worst weather America has ever seen combined to create a very significant obstacle.
On the plus side, The Hurricane Heist attempts to outdo all previous weather disaster movies with some spectacular visual effects .
On the down side, its acting and plot-hole-riven storyline rivals Geostorm for predictable dimwittedness.
For example, the ease at which the bad guys take over a US government installation defies belief.
But the element which really got to me was the staggering lack of emotion.
Faced with the death of a friend or a relative, the participants demonstrate the shock equivalent to biting on a sour apple and then get on with their day.
Indeed, their reactions are so tepid that I started to believe that they must have been deliberate and that The Hurricane Heist was a well-disguised comedy.
To add to the mirth are the bizarrely inconsistent accents.
That said, Mrs W and I did stick with it and there is a finale which is so well executed it is bordering on exciting.

Reasons to watch: Dramatic special effects
Reasons to avoid: Predictable storyline

Laughs: None
Jumps: None
Vomit: None
Nudity: None
Overall rating: 5.5/10

Director quote - Rob Cohen: "I thought that if you do a cross-genre in something like this, you’ll have to look at every action film [ingredient]. You’ll need to have gun battles, car chases and fights. You got to re-interpret everything, because it’s not just happening in the normal world. It’s happening in a very unnormal world of a hurricane.

The big question - In a card-driven society, are the days of heists over?

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