The Hurricane Heist

Hurricane Andrew is laying waste to Alabama, and a father and two sons are trying their damnedest to get out of the way, only for disaster to strike. Move forward 25 years and we are in the same area with a convoy of trucks transporting used bank notes to their destruction at a US Treasury facility, when there’s a hurricane warning.

The meteorological office are concerned but don’t consider it a major threat. Cue the lone voice of crack meteorologist Will (Toby Kebbell) in a weather beating Batmobile (vaguely resembling the Bale model) type car who states that this is going to be a big one. Naturally he’s laughed off.

The Treasury convoy reaches the facility as two techy types set about doing something or other. The generator breaks down so Casey (Maggie Grace) pops out of the super-secure plant into town to find an engineer Breeze (!) (Ryan Kwaten).

Meanwhile the facility’s security goes offline and it is attacked from all sides as the villains led by Connor (Ralph Ineson) try to get their hands on $600million in used notes. Not plain sailing as a key member of personnel (Casey) is out of the building. There’s now a scramble to get her back. Breeze it turns out is the brother of supermeteo man Will. They are estranged, obviously with bad memories of hurricanes past and gone in separate directions. However, they must now join forces with Casey to thwart the villains, who themselves aren’t all quite what they seem. All that with a Category Gazillion hurricane blowing around outside.

The Hurricane Heist is knuckle dragging tosh on a monumental scale and it is hard to believe this sort of thing is still considered to be creative. Every conceivable cliché is thrown in to the mix only for it come out in a stale predictable order. It is absurd in the extreme with the scenes in the middle of the storm with hubcaps and the escape form the mall are especially so. The effects are ok and serviceable but all seen before and bereft of imagination.

The cast are at least professional (if only to give someone involved with this nonsense some credit) working from a profoundly lazy script and a hackneyed scenario. Rob Cohen is the director of the original The Fast and The Furious but that was in 2001 and while that franchise has booted up several scales in the intervening years it doesn’t appear that Cohen has. There’s a sterile competence about the execution of this ludicrous production in that the whole thing, however daft flows. But there is no warm flow of engagement, everything just coldly and mechanically connects.

There may well have been some notion that the film’s many flaws will be overlooked and that the audience will non-thinkingly and merrily allow themselves to get sucke(re)d in for the ride. That is very cynical, plausible and fine if there is some nugget of entertainment within. The real problem is that even with all the effects, the firefights and the action, it is in the end just a boring film.