I have no idea how The Last Heist got in my queue, but when I started watching it, I was asking for the manager to my life to find out who was responsible for letting this mess slip through. Someone needs to be fired. Even Sharknado had enjoyable high points. To be fair, the premise sounds promising. A group of bank robbers discover that one of their hostages is a serial killer. Henry Rollins plays the serial killer, and Reign’s Torrance Coombs plays the robbers’ mastermind, which yikes.
I know that the cast could not have been the element that drew me to The Last Heist. I have seen Reign and am slightly embarrassed by that fact. I barely recognize Rollins, but mostly for his political posts. He is an actor? I do not want to blame them for the dreckitude because they did not write the script or film it however sometimes a performance (review Michael Fassbender’s resume) in a bad movie is so good that it briefly and slightly elevates the movie. It becomes the only reason to see it, and the movie snowballs in popularity because of it. Rollins and Coombs do not do that, but they also are not bad. They did the job and hopefully had fun paying their bills.
The Last Heist is too busy as if it is a person wearing too much jewelry. The writers threw everything against the wall to see if it would stick: estranged siblings, drug cartels, chick cop against sausage fest trying to do her job. Many of these elements were introduced way too late in the proceedings to feel worthy as an earned, well laid out, slightly teased earlier complication. If someone spent more time developing the cool factor of the premise instead of being easily distracted by the next shiny object, maybe it could have been over the top fun, but it never is. It takes itself too seriously. All of these factions are supposed to be professionals. It is basically an ascendancy show down between different illegal professions to see who will come out on top and a race against time as they are pursued by the law. It is impossible to get invested in any of these storylines because it is difficult to suspend disbelief and believe that any of these individuals are at the head of their class.
The Last Heist is a mash up of a slasher film and a heist film without embracing either. In a heist film, viewers get shown the plan and the personalities of the robbers. In a slasher film, there is usually an unlikely final person who has to face off and at least come close to defeating the serial killer. Also it helps if the serial killer has a distinct profile built up before mayhem ensues. As the movie unfolds, we should become more emotionally invested in that character and usually get a sense of that person’s normal routine before shenanigans ensue. This film skips any of these possible foundations. No character is memorable or worthy of more than a slight glance. My notes indicate that my interest was slightly piqued during an exchange between a robber named Biggs and the serial killer. Why? I have no idea, and I know that it is not worth anyone’s time to rewatch the film or fast forward to try and find the scene. Congratulations to Nick Principe who plays Briggs for managing to get me to notice some elusive moment briefly rising above the quagmire of cheap action.
The Last Heist feels as if the writer liked the idea of the end then reverse engineered how to get there. If the heart of the story lay with the ascendancy of the serial killer and the meekest one becoming the unlikely person who could stop him, then the rest were just detractions from the story’s momentum, and a good editor should have intervened to make the story sharper.
I love diversity in movies, but why do criminal outfits have better representation in terms of race and gender than any other workplace? Are robbers on their off hours just really progressive, chill people so they naturally form a well-balanced group or are criminal regulations really strict paired with a vigilant human resources department that will not permit you to do a heist until your crew can double as a convincing Benetton ad? Sure you engage in illegal activities and may inflict physical harm on innocent victims, but you did not vote for Presidon’t. No. Unfortunately The Last Heist is so bad that even I, who keeps the bar really low so I can get my daily dose of women kicking butt vitamins, could not get a second of my life watching them.
A special shout out goes to the women playing the robbers. Their performance stood out as the worse in a film filled with low points. I know that it is not entirely the actors’ fault, but I conflated my disappointment in the women robbers’ lack of physical expertise with the performance, which were independently bad from the way that the characters were written. You are the best robber in the world, but you did not take the safety off your gun? So much smack talk, nothing to back it up with. The Punisher’s second season needs more credit when compared to movies like The Last Heist. I did not know any of the nameless women trotted out to fight and get killed, but I never once doubted their badassery as they fell one by one. Their effectiveness increases their opposition’s stature, but this movie never understood that a serial killer is only as interesting as his prey is elusive. There should always be potential for the tables to be turned. Usually the women are the secret weapon of any movie, but they did not persist.
I was kind of hoping for the chick cop in The Last Heist to pick up the slack, but poor Cynthia is the closest that we get to a kick ass woman, hell, a kick ass character. She gets shitty service, bullied and never does get to retrieve her safety deposit box, but she kept in her lane, did what she could and fared better than the other characters who were filled with bravado, but were either boring in their version of scene chewing glory and/or dead by the end of the day. Cynthia is the real winner in a game that you lose by playing. She even beat the viewers by getting out of the movie before us. Be Cynthia! She was not about that life and knew how to stay in her lane. The last shall be first.
The Last Heist is also visually lackluster and annoying. It is chaos cinema without the action reflecting the emotion of the characters, which means it is just chaos or poor editing and shooting.
Do not see The Last Heist. There is nothing in this film good enough to redeem it. Eighty-four minutes of your life are too precious to watch this movie. You can literally do anything else with your time, and it would be more rewarding. If you really want to watch this movie, clean all the kitty litter that you can find first because then at least you would be doing something useful with refuse.