THE LAST HEIST – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Lots of good movies borrow from great movies. Tarantino did it in Reservoir Dogs, and Scorsese even did it in The Departed. Good ideas come from throwbacks of famous genres past all the time. The Last Heist steals from all the heist movies, and tries to be as interesting as most of those. One can only imagine the pitch for The Last Heist: We’re going to do a sleek modern robbers movie, but one of the guys in the bank is a serial killer. That premise is all well and good, but it’s also pretty much the last thing that The Last Heist has to offer.

The plot here is as mentioned before. The Last Heist is a movie about a group of robbers who try to rob a closing safety deposit box center, but soon encounter a brutal serial killer. It’s a fun idea, and could have made for an interesting whodunit as the pressure of the killer hiding in plain sight, while also having to deal with the police slowly got to the robbers. The Last Heist has no interest in putting that much work into the characters or bolstering the details of the story though. Instead you get the one leader white guy, the two tough and rude girls, the wise young man who gives advice and listens to problems, the one respectful robber and then the one unhinged guy. Their names do not seem of importance to the movie, and you won’t remember them either. All their dialogue seems like it’s taken from other heist films, and eventually the hammy acting leads to the film not being particularly exciting or even concerning. There’s gunshots, and bullets flying all around the characters, and even then the engagement level is sluggish.

The one shining light that comes in the acting department is the serial killer Rev. Bernard, played by Henry Rollins. His “Windows Killer” is an unsubtle attempt to make a character similar to the Reverend in The Night of the Hunter, but the comparison ends there. The lack of shooting creativity, and smart dialogue let Rollins down completely, and unlike the aforementioned Hunter the “Rev” doesn’t mean a thing in context of the story. Rollins makes him kind of creepy, and at least the gore effects that appear around him provide some intensity, but there’s never a sense of true evil to him. Without the added weight of excellent cinematography, and a good script Rollins is left with nothing to work with even if the conception of the character is well crafted.

The Last Heist is an empty piece of work. Analytically it doesn’t provide anything of value, and it’s not particularly thrilling or scary in anyway. Go watch The Silence of the Lambs, The Night of the Hunter, Heat, or Triple 9 and you’ll get more emotional, and satisfying entertainment. The Last Heist takes everything it has from those films, and can’t manage to be anything more than mildly engaging.