The Hurricane Heist

2018 hurricane heist movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Just read the title.

There's a moment when one of the bad guys, racing to keep distance between the big rig he's driving and the menacing CGI "eye wall" of the hurricane, pokes his head out of the window, looks up at the storm about to envelop him, and screams, "Damn you!" I think he might even have shaken a clenched fist when he did it. In my memory of watching The Hurricane Heist, he did shake that fist.

Sometimes you just want to watch something really dumb, and if you can watch something on the big screen to make it both really big and really dumb, it's even better. This satisfies although I have to admit that I was a little worried at first. The opening scene shows two young brothers watching their father get silo'd to death during a hurricane and clouds form the shape of a skull, and although I did laugh inappropriately and elicit a glance from somebody sitting in front of me, the CGI storm clouds looked pretty good. The scene drips with schmaltz, however, and my brain was already trying to write a future scene in the movie.

"And that's when that silo killed our daddy."
Or, "I 'member one storm with as much fight as this 'un--the one that killed our daddy."
Or, "Red, Omaha, hike hike! Let's avenge our daddy's death now by killing this hurricane!"

But then things got downright scientific as the boring characters start discussing an impending hurricane. I worried that this movie, which I might have seen only because the poster teased by saying it was from the creator of The Fast and the Furious, was going to take itself a little too seriously. I also worried that there was going to be a body count of zero in this because the main bad guy, a D-grade Liam Neeson, kept getting lines about how he didn't want to kill anybody. Gradually, the characters start screaming half of their lines at each other and things devolve into scenarios and action sequences that are less and less plausible. And there's plenty of violence, the implausible trio of action heroes and heroine even spattered with enough blood to make them look like they just walked off the set of an Evil Dead movie. It's ludicrous fun for the most part even though it is still guilty of taking itself a little too seriously at times.