There is genuinely nothing worse than over thinking things…

If anybody comes into a movie with a title called The Hurricane Heist looking for strong logic, structure, good performances and well written dialogue just needs to fuck right off.  However with that being said if you want a 105 minutes of throttle down action that is reminiscent of some of the occasionally silly but truly memorable action romps of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s that have seemingly been lost in the age of the superhero then this one just might be for you.

It’s just another milk run for Casey (Maggie Grace) an ATF officer looking to lay low after an operation gone wrong and stuck babysitting dead money drops to a US Treasury Installation where the money eventually gets shredded.  It’s a quiet small town life down in New Hope, Alabama and she likes that just fine that is until people get ideas.  In a town that still has vivid memories of the destruction that Hurricane Andrew brought them in 1992, another category 5 storm is bearing down on them fast, and it makes for the perfect scenario for a group of mercenaries and local thugs, lead by an inside man to go for the heist of the century.

Make no mistake, The Hurricane Heist is truly ridiculous as it’s occasionally clunky dialogue, sloppy editing and frenetic pacing are all big problems in the film…but are they really?  This is an experience that is wholly and truly about the ride that we are going on and it plays it all so unabashedly serious that we just milk more enjoyment out of this trashy action ride because it knows exactly what it’s doing and it leans into it with every ounce of energy it has.

Director Rob Cohen is no stranger to the genre and with this outing we get, by design a movie that actively wants you to react to it in one way or another.  It’s not a shoulda, coulda, woulda real world type of scenario, it’s a deep fried slice of pure cinematic nonsense as cars go flying by and hubcaps are used to impale people in the middle of a wind storm when you run out of bullets.  There isn’t a single ounce here that you are supposed to take seriously, and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that as long as it all looks pretty damn good, which quite frankly it does putting the bulk of their $35-40 Million dollar budget into the action on the screen.

Resurrected from a story treatment that had been around from the 1980’s, the script by Jeff Dixon and Scott Windhauser hits the buttons that it needs to with little else floating around it.  Hardly a great piece as the character development with our leads is pretty minimal but it gets the job done well enough, despite some obvious budget and questionable casting.

After breaking out in the hit show Lost, Maggie Grace has spent the bulk of her acting career trying to avoid some stereotyping mistakes and pigeonholing into certain types of roles with only a moderate amount of success.  While the script doesn’t always do her any favors in this type of story she actually comports herself exceptionally well and we buy her as a Federal Agent.  Not as any kind of superstar bad ass but as someone who simply want and believes in doing the right thing, almost in the mold of her infamous on screen dad, Liam Neeson.

While the relationship between these two brothers who serve as an unlikely source of help for Maggie Grace’s character is more than a little awkwardly shoehorned into this story, both Toby Kebbell and Ryan Kwanten make the best of what they are given and make for likeable sidekicks in this female lead action thriller.  They support up Grace and allow for some moments of levity while on the run from the bad guys.  And while the consistently underrated Ralph Ineson who is a Brit, playing an Irishman who has lived in the States since he was 5 yet still has a thick accent didn’t get much to go with, he at least made sense leading a cavalcade of bad guys who could barely deliver their lines, or you just couldn’t stop laughing when they did.

Call it what you will as The Hurricane Heist could count as anything from Modern Day Grindhouse to a throwback piece of action cinema where all you need is a simple premise and an excuse to get your characters hurdling down the road of the universe that it is in.  It’ll never be high art, but if you want to grab a cocktail or two, throw popcorn at the screen and let out the occasional good natured hoot or guffaw at what you see in front of you…then this is the movie for you.