Six long years after organizing the underrated action film The Tournament, Scott Mann finally plants his ass in the director’s chair again to deliver another underrated action film in Heist. Although deprived of originality, it’s kinda great.
A loyal, longtime dealer at a riverboat casino, Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Losers) is in quite a pickle: His little girl is in the hospital receiving treatment for a life-threatening ailment, but all that is about to stop because he can’t afford to pay. After going to his gruff boss, Pope (Robert De Niro, not far removed from his Sam “Ace” Rothstein character in Martin Scorsese’s Casino), to ask for a $300,000 loan that promptly is turned down, Vaughn does the only thing he feels he can do: Rob Pope’s place. Teaming with an opportunistic security guard (Dave Bautista, Guardians of the Galaxy), Vaughn uses his access code to gain entrance to the vault — and thereby $3 million of laundered dough. Help yourself.
As happens in heist films, the heist doesn’t go quite as planned, sending the crew scrambling with gunfire at their heels until they hop aboard and hijack a city bus full of innocent civilians. Thus, with an hour left, Heist becomes Speed, minus the mph gimmick. As the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, all through the town, Vaughn and company are chased by Pope’s right-hand man (a believably imposing Morris Chestnut, The Call) and the cops, including a sympathetic officer played stiffly by Haywire’s Gina Carano, a former MMA fighter.
One looks at the pace and polish of Heist and thinks, “Why not give Mann the next Fast and Furious sequel?” His action scenes are alive and cut in a way that keeps them easy to follow — a huge difference in today’s marketplace, as is a lead performance as solid as Morgan’s. The ending is as predictable as any, yet detonates a few surprises to get there — the most shocking being the charm and humor brought to the pic’s second half by Saved by the Bell vet Mark-Paul Gosselaar, of all people! It’s like the part was written for Ryan Reynolds, but they couldn’t afford him once De Niro boarded ship, so they “settled” for this former teen TV heartthrob. Against all expectations, he steals his scenes and is terrific. —Rod Lott