Heist (2015)

You can tell Jeffrey Dean Morgan has made the jump from character actor to leading man by his fictional offspring. In 2005, he was the father of adult sons on SUPERNATURAL. Ten years later, he has a sick little girl in HEIST, one of the dumbest thrillers to come down the path recently. It’s the kind of film where a five-year-old kid takes public transportation around a major city at 4:00 a.m.. There’s absolutely no story reason a little kid has to be on the bus, but either nobody cared enough about the movie to tell director Scott Mann (THE TOURNAMENT), “Hey, it’s kinda stupid to have a kid on the bus,” or somebody did and Mann said, “Eh, whatever.”

The kind of movie that casts Gina Carano (DEADPOOL) for her acting skills, HEIST casts Morgan as a dealer in a casino owned by Robert DeNiro, who cares less about this film than Scott Mann does. Luckily, DeNiro is a lot better at his job than Mann is, and he’s enormously watchable even playing a cliche character spouting cliche dialogue that wasn’t written so much as cut and pasted from IT TAKES A THIEF fanfic. Morgan needs $300,000 for his daughter’s medical bills (“Insurance doesn’t even cover the treatments.” Shoulda explored the Obamacare exchanges, Jeff.). He asks DeNiro for it, DeNiro refuses, mainly out of spite. Unfortunately for him, just coincidentally it happens the same night security man Dave Bautista (SPECTRE) approaches total stranger Morgan to ask, “Hey, wanna help me steal $3 million from Robert DeNiro?”

Shockingly, their crack plan devised in a bar the night before goes wrong, and Morgan, Bautista, and a shot sidekick end up on a hijacked bus carrying the little kid, a pregnant woman, a guy in a beaver suit, driver D.B. Sweeney (FIRE IN THE SKY), and some other caricatures. Who will catch up to them first: DeNiro’s assassin Morris Chestnut (HALF PAST DEAD) or cops Gina Carano (DEADPOOL) and Mark-Paul Gosselaar (SAVED BY THE BELL), whose insouciant performance indicates he also doesn’t care about this movie, but had a good time making it. He also more than makes up for his partner’s impression of the walking tree in FROM HELL IT CAME.

HEIST starts in media res with some action, then a flashback to “One Week Earlier,” which is the laziest way to open a picture. On the other hand, Mann isn’t bad at the action scenes, and he seems to have shot a lot of the bus scenes on a bus on an actual road, which helps open up the picture and add some realism to a plot that desperately needs some. The big plot twist near the end assumes the local cops are as dumb as Enos and Roscoe, and the whole story hinges on the unlikelihood of a hospital accepting a bag of cash that the whole city knows was stolen the night before in a heist that has resulted in several murders and attempted murders, including those of police officers. Kate Bosworth (SUPERMAN RETURNS) has one scene as DeNiro’s daughter, and model Summer Altice plays a woman who lays naked in bed with DeNiro, providing the veteran actor with the only reason he did this movie.