The Hurricane Heist

(Reader’s Note: “The Hurricane Heist” was so visually unappealing we have foregone including stills with this review. They are all awful.)

There are two moments in “The Hurricane Heist” when reality wonderfully intrudes. These occur when circumstantial allies Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace), US Treasury Agent, and Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell), meteorological ace, in the midst of trying to fend off a US Mint robbery, stop to pee, and then later when they pause for peanut butter and jelly. Rest breaks and protein injections suggest a gleam in director Rob Cohen’s eye, gleefully giving time to actual physical concerns a movie with a title like “The Hurricane Heist” would normally ignore. Alas, this is about as much fun as the movie ever allows itself, never reveling in its character archetypes like a Roland Emmerich joint might while mostly forgoing thinking outside the action box to just re-heat leftovers from so many movies before it. When you plant a set-up in the first two minutes involving a football hook & ladder and don’t find a way to literally engineer it during your climactic tri-semi truck chase, really, what good are you?

Maggie Grace, bless her heart, tries to have fun as she credibly guffaws at the bad jokes her character tells or is made to endure, or as her character takes the wheel of her flatbed truck carrying $600 million in cash that needs to be removed from circulation and plows through tobacco fields to avoid the traffic trying to evacuate coastal Gulfport, Alabama on the account of an approaching Category 5 hurricane. This move is meant to demonstrate Casey’s dogged ingenuity that will so frustrate her gruff partner Perkins (Ralph Ineson) when he turns coat to steal the cash they are carrying. That’s a spoiler, perhaps, but it happens very early in the proceedings. Plus, double crosses, and even half a triple cross, abound, and you will find yourself wishing that villainous hacker Sasha (Melissa Bolona), dressed like she’s going to the club rather than the center of a CAT5, was the chief villain anyway since she at least breaks the bad guy mold. Casey, as fate would have it, winds up off the premises when things go wrong and in the company of Will, and eventually his brother Breeze (Ryan Kwanten), the trio forming a makeshift resistance.

The hurricane effects do not inspire awe. Jan de Bont’s decades-old “Twister” contained some dull computer generated tornadoes not unlike Cohen’s computer-generated hurricane, but de Bont mixed his with real images of fabulously threatening black and green and purple Midwestern skies. Cohen has no such desire, making you wish he’d add some sharks to all that violent wind for a little variety. He drenches everything in a dismal grey, and I mean everything. If that makes sense in the pouring rain, even inside the US Mint all green of the cash is washed out, not to mention the green of Sasha’s cocktail dress. Even during the eye of the storm climax when the sun comes out, the film barely brightens, unintentionally underscoring its sleepiness despite so much noise. Noise is also a product of the action scenes, where lots of bullets are fired in the rain, while the aforementioned semi truck chase down an endless freeway is repetitive and as short on practical effects as the hurricane.

The thieves, meanwhile, are short on motivation, though writers Jeff Dixon and Scott Windhauser dangle a couple tantalizing southern Robin Hood threads they oddly have no real intention of exploring, rendering all of Cohen’s artfully placed American flags in the background as nothing more than a kind of patriotic product placement. If anything, because of Casey’s virtually non-existent backstory, all this red, white and blue might have spoken to her staring down these robbers as a sense of simple duty, though this is more inferred than conveyed. No, the intended emotional through-line here is that of Will and Breeze, evinced in the movie’s opening scene, one in which the adolescent brothers are forced to watch their father die in Hurricane Andrew, a scene that literalizes something like a groaning skull in the clouds, suggesting, I guess, mother nature as the grim reaper, though this plays less philosophical than like an inadvertent punchline.

This traumatic event spurs Breeze to become a heavy drinker and Will to become a weatherman in the hopes of fighting back against hurricanes. That plot point also evokes “Twister” and its characters’ desire to develop better warning signs for tornadoes, and there are further hints of “The Day After Tomorrow” as Will is allowed one speech about the hell Earth inflicts on its own climate. But as soon as Will mentions climate science, “The Hurricane Heist” drops it. It’s a real missed opportunity. After all, at a crucial moment late in the proceedings, when Breeze reveals his hidden home armory to help in the heist prevention while proudly citing his Alabama residency, you can practically hear liberals groan, not unlike how I heard (literally!) an audience member at my screening yawn when Will mentions climate change to Casey.

“The Hurricane Heist”, of all movies, teases merging blue state priorities with red ones, only to quickly let its glimmer of bipartisanship fly away in the wind.

Trailer Battle: Hurricane Heist v Hard Rain

I awoke one morning last week to a text from my friend Rory which merely included a Youtube link fashioned with a “You’re welcome.” Indeed, I was thankful, because what awaited me on the other end of that link was a trailer for a forthcoming film called – [assumes Dave Barry voice] I’m not making this up – “The Hurricane Heist.” It’s a bank heist, see, in a……hurricane! Ai-yee! And upon seeing the trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, my mind immediately flashed back 20 years to “Hard Rain”, a thriller about a bank heist in a flood that is only memorable for the worst Bruce Springsteen reference in cinematic history (I’m not giving it away for free – you will have to slog through that scrap heap the same as I did lo so many years ago) and the classic 2003 Onion piece in which a woman comes to wholly regret a one night stand when she wakes up to discover her temporary paramour’s DVD collection is littered with “banal choices” like “Bedazzled”, “Narrow Margin”, and, yes, “Hard Rain.” “Don’t you buy a movie because you’re somehow passionate about it and want to watch it again and again?” she wonders. “Does this guy feel that way about ‘Hard Rain?’” That’s good stuff.

As such, almost immediately upon concluding “The Hurricane Heist” trailer, I checked “The Hurricane Heist’s” release date to make a mental note (must see!) and then watched the trailer for “Hard Rain”, which made me nostalgic because that trailer adorned my first theatrical showing of “Titanic.” (So did Howie Long’s “Firestorm.” 1998, man.) And I have to say, the “Hard Rain” trailer is pretty damn good in that It-Looks-So-Bad-It-Could-Be-Good way. It wasn’t, of course, as established, but still, we are not talking about the finished product. We are talking about a two minute burst, and if trailers have become, in their own viral, attention span-less way, a kind of art, I could not help but compare “Hard Rain’s” trailer to “The Hurricane Heist’s.” You know what that means…trailer battle!!!

Trailer Battle: Hurricane Heist v Hard Rain

The trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, alas, starts out behind the eight ball. That is because the guiding voice of the “Hard Rain” trailer is the immortal Don LaFontaine, meaning that when he says “you have the perfect recipe for the perfect crime”, you don’t snicker, you nod along and think, “You know, he’s right.” The trailer for “The Hurricane Heist”, on the other hand, in these tragic LaFontaine-less times (he died in 2008) forgoes any kind of overwrought narration to just slap the words “the perfect heist” on the screen.

Of course, it’s a bit unfair to ding “The Hurricane Heist” when LaFontaine was simply not available. But, even if we remove LaFontaine from the equation, the manner in which “The Hurricane Heist” trailer parcels out information is suspect. Let me explain.

“The Hurricane Heist” trailer opens with this rather standard-issue CGI shot of a hurricane followed by a character declaring, as if we didn’t already know, “Hurricane’s coming.” That’s the best you got?

Compare this to the “Hard Rain” trailer, which, before LaFontaine even speaks, communicates to us its movie’s environment with a Bible pull. Respect.

And then accentuates that with a shot that pushes in on Randy Quaid in pouring rain on a CB asking “Are we all gonna die?” in this sort of dialed down deranged voice that almost knows it’s in the movie’s trailer.

Quaid points to another way in which “The Hurricane Heist” is positioned behind the eight ball from the beginning. That is, “Hard Rain” star power, or a version of it, with Quaid, with Christian Slater, with Minnie Driver (who would have been on her way to a Best Supporting Actress nomination for “Good Will Hunting” round about this time), and with, yes, Morgan Freeman. “The Hurricane Heist”, on the other hand, has Maggie Grace, which, no offense to Maggie Grace but she can’t hang with Freeman-y gravitas. But then, the trailer does Grace little favors with lines like “This is not good.” That’s not the sort of line that pops, not like Freeman’s resplendent “He’s a slippery one”, which the impeccably-voiced actor turns into cornball poetry. Almost as good is Quaid’s indulging in a Bush I joke: “Read my lips: three million dollars.” That joke, of course, would have been ten years old in 1998, marking it as dated then though it feels that much more dated now, and that passé quality brings us to the trailers’ most stark difference — that is, editing.

“The Hurricane Heist” trailer cuts with that trendy alacrity while the “Hard Rain” trailer not only draws its cuts out a beat or two longer, but goes so far as to just sort of plunk a whole scene, if condensed, down right at the beginning. And so rather than merely mixing a ton of blinding images Bay-style together to fry our eyes, the “Hard Rain” trailer finds surprising cheesy, old-fashioned joy in its edits, like Christian Slater’s saying he buried the money in a cemetery because he doesn’t like to carry around that much cash followed by a cut to a smiling Minnie Driver, that age-old device of cuing us to chuckle at a joke that is not funny.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: man, “Hard Rain” is running away with this thing. Not so fast! I haven’t mentioned “The Hurricane Heist” trailer’s secret weapon — namely, The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Indeed, even if the “Hard Rain” trailer indulges in some jokes, like the one above, it takes itself very seriously, whereas “The Hurricane Heist” wants you to know this is not merely escapism; this is platinum level escapism. If you spend the first chunk of that trailer wondering if it wants you to laugh, “Rock You Like A Hurricane” tells you that it does, communicating its unabashed non-commitment to actual quality.

Then again, the “Hard Rain” trailer has its own secret weapon.

This isn’t a show at the State Fair grandstand, son, this is a movie. And Betty White marching out on her stoop and calling Quaid’s character on the carpet might as well be “Hard Rain” dunking on “The Hurricane Heist.” In fact, if I hadn’t already seen “Hard Rain” and known it was supremely awful and awfully boring, I’d probably go watch it.