‘Heist 88’ Review: Courtney B. Vance Rounds Up a Crew for an Extremely Unimpressive Bank Robbery
29.09.2023 - 07:11
/ variety.com
J. Kim Murphy Bank robbers tend to be fairly easy to root for in movies. After all, it’s not the audience’s money getting pocketed onscreen.
They typically don’t want to kill anybody, and their schemes tend to be pretty spectacular. “Heist 88,” a new Showtime release inspired by a real-life Chicago robbery from the year 1988, doesn’t trust viewers to be so accepting, so it spends most of its time underlining the generic reasons that its aggrieved crack team have for taking on the job. It’s a crime film that finds little joy in criminality, crammed with characters who’ve been backed into a corner, hindered by an overarching morality that doesn’t match the material.
Courtney B. Vance leads the feature as Jeremy Horne, an over-the-hill thief about to head back to prison. At a celebration of life for his brother, remembered as a Black community leader, Horne has a run-in with his impressionable nephew Marshall (Bentley Green).
Though Marshall has been told by his family to avoid his uncle, he needs help paying off the loan sharks who funded his house music career. Meanwhile, Horne sees a $20 million opportunity through Marshall’s friends, who are fed up with working minimum-wage gigs at a powerhouse Chicago bank. Jeremy Horne isn’t that bad of a guy.
He has to be a bit deceitful to gain the trust of these youngsters, but he only needs to stoke their justified frustrations with the bank‘s racist management. Horne is mostly just doing this job so that he can cut in his former partner, Buddha Ray (Keith David), and his one-who-got-away, Bree Barnes (Keesha Sharp). Vance is a talented actor, underserved here by the fairly shopworn archetype cooked up by screenwriter Dwayne Johnson-Cochran.
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