The Hurricane Heist is a film about people who try to rob a cash storage facility in the middle of a major hurricane.
It has been a long time since I watched a film so unapologetically dumb as The Hurricane Heist. It harkens back to the old 90s disaster thrillers. Like Hard Rain was Die Hard during a monsoon, or Firestorm is Die Hard during a wild fire, The Hurricane Heist is Die Hard during a hurricane. Yep, that pretty much sums it up.
The film largely follows two brothers, who as children saw their father killed by a hurricane. What is with this trend in this sort of movie where a beloved family member needs to be killed by a natural disaster to give it some kind of personal stakes? We see it in Twister, we saw it in Dante’s Peak. It’s a fucking hurricane, not a sentient being… or is it? At the start of the film, the kids look into the sky and see like a skull face snarling at them in the clouds. I’d love to know if this is meant to be representative of how these idiots see the hurricane – maybe it does represent something evil and malicious to them. Or maybe the screenwriters legitimately thought it would add some level of sentience and consciousness to the hurricane. It is dumb. Once the kids grow up, the action takes place as a new hurricane hits town. Federal agents protecting large sums of cash are coming to town as there’s a big cash storage building, but of course one of the agents goes rogue and brings in his own small militia to overtake the facility and try and steal $600 million in cold, hard cash.
The action star of it is the one federal agent that isn’t a crook, played by Maggie Grace. She ends up getting the help of the two brothers and it is just so incredibly dumb. One of the brothers (played by Toby Kebbell) ends up being a meteorologist, of course, we need an expert here after all. He happens to basically drive the Batmobile, which has a system of high tech gadgets that they use to take out the terrorists. It’s dumb.
The dialogue is inane, the characters are paper thin, the plot is absurd, the acting is completely cheesy. Honestly it feels like a computer generated the dialogue in the script after analyzing all the worst action films of the 90s. It’s dumb. Like so dumb. But it at the very least doesn’t pretend to be smarter than it is. It doesn’t try to outsmart people or do anything storywise beyond the plot’s means if that makes sense. There was a little twist in the movie that I wanted to go “ugh, that’s stupid,” but it kind of actually made sense with what the plot had already done? It was executed in a stupid way of course, but it wasn’t totally nonsensical.
It doesn’t feel right to be dumping on a movie called The Hurricane Heist, because it delivers exactly what it advertises. A heist during a hurricane. It reminded me so much of Hard Rain, which is another forgettable (and dumb) heist set during a storm. This film is so dumb it’s almost admirable. It doesn’t care. At one point there’s a stand off in a shopping mall while the hurricane is overhead. One of the characters blasts a hole in the skylight over the mall and everyone gets sucked out like someone blasted an airlock into space. It made me laugh out loud. There are legitimately entertaining action set pieces here and there. And the climax of the film is kind of fun? Trucks loaded with cash are trying to literally outrun the hurricane while the good guys board the trucks and fight the bad guys. The director of this film is Rob Cohen by the way, and yes, it does feel exactly like a Fast and The Furious or XXX movie.
The film lacks a solid central star. The thing with all these ‘Die Hard on a ______’ or ‘Die Hard during a ______’ movies is that they miss the most key element of Die Hard – having a realistic and likeable main character to anchor down the movie. It’s not that these characters are particularly unlikeable, it’s just that they’re not very interesting or compelling or realistic. They’re very two dimensional for the most part. The movie tries to generate conflict between the two brothers, but it never really works and the movie doesn’t have enough of an attention span to service its own story.
I wish The Hurricane Heist leaned more into the absurdity of the plot. The moment I saw a bunch of bad guys get sucked out of the roof of a shopping mall, I thought “this should be the whole movie”. The whole movie should be as absurd and over the top as that. Unfortunately the film plays it a little too straight. It’s a bit too serious in places, and it’s way too dumb. You’ll be blown away by how dumb this film is. Have I mentioned that the movie is dumb?
Rating: ★1/2
Zero Stars 