The Hurricane Heist

Explosions, car chases, and shootouts. What else do you need in an action-packed heist film? Oh yeah, the biggest hurricane to hit America in almost thirty years. The Hurricane Heist is everything you’d expect from, The Fast and The Furious director, Rob Cohen. Watch as an extremely intelligent crew takes on a U.S. Treasury facility to secure 600 million dollars while also racing against a hurricane.

The film is set in a small town on the coast of Alabama. We first get to see two of our protagonists, Will and Breeze, both at a very young age, in a truck alongside their father deep inside a hurricane. Fallen debris causes their truck to flip and they are forced to hunker down inside a nearby house. Will and Breeze wait inside the house as their father braves the storm to winch their truck to something sturdy. Sadly, this decision leads to their father’s tragic death inside the hurricane. In this beginning scene, we get to see our protagonists’ tragic back-story as well as meet one of our antagonists, the hurricane itself. Immediately after his father’s death, we see Will stare up at the hurricane. The clouds from the storm form a poorly animated skull to signify that the hurricane is a being of death. While this gives a face to the hurricane, it hardly felt like an antagonist. I could see what they were trying to do but something about it made me roll my eyes.

Now we cut to about thirty years later in the same town. We are introduced to all the characters in the film. First, we are introduced to an older and more mature Will. Never letting go of his father’s death, he became a meteorologist, hoping to one day uncover the secrets of hurricanes. We are then introduced to the sheriff. He and his team are working to evacuate the town. Next, we see Casey, our third protagonist. She works for the U.S. Treasury and is in charge of keeping the 600 million dollars safe during the hurricane. Traveling with Casey is Perkins, our main antagonist. He and his team have been planning a heist to steal all 600 million dollars during the hurricane. In my opinion, this was a very confusing way to set up the characters. I understand that you aren’t supposed to know who’s good and who’s bad but somehow I was under the impression that Casey was the main antagonist until Perkins took over. Lastly, we are introduced to an older Breeze who has grown up to be a mechanic. For some unexplained reason, he is the only person in the entire town that wants to stay and wait out the storm.

During these introductions, the whole town is being evacuated. The only people left in the town, are the ones mentioned in the paragraph above. How convenient. After everything is set up, the treasury urgently needs a repairman to fix one of their generators. Convenient how the only civilian left in town is the repairman. If you ask me, this is just lazy writing. Casey is forced to go find Breeze before the storm hits. During this time, Perkin’s goons begin to take over the Treasury facility. While it was an action-packed scene, the takeover was also very lazily put together. For example, to break into the facility, all they needed to do was place C4 on a door to blow it up and they were in. In doing so, they placed the C4 then stood about 5 feet away from it while it detonated. If you ask me, they should’ve been dead but no, they were perfectly fine. Also, you would need so much more to break into a United States Treasury facility. These are some of the most heavily guarded places in the nation but because there was a hurricane, they decided they only needed about thirteen guards on duty. The robbers also made it clear that they didn’t want to kill anyone for some reason. That was never explained.

The rest of the film consists of Breeze getting captured and Will and Casey coming up with different plans to stop the heist. I’d like to mention, while Breeze is captured, he is forced to fix the generator. The heist team decides it’s a great idea to leave him alone for extremely long periods of time. While this is going on, Will and Casey are coming up with the most outrageous plans that use the hurricane to their advantage. And when I say outrageous, I mean OUTRAGEOUS.

In my opinion, I did not like this film. It was filled with sub-par acting and unrealistic stunts. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone looking for a well-crafted movie to watch. However, if you are into action scenes and bad acting because it makes you laugh, this is a great film for that. Hurricane Heist releases on Blu-ray and DVD on June 5.