A pulpy, functionally engaging movie, The Vault is an odd mélange that sort
of works and meanders interestingly from its effective opening credits to its
mildly satisfying Twilight Zone revelation
towards the end but, with the subsequent final and totally unnecessary generic
"shock" epilogue ending, makes you want to kick in your TV screen. Up
until then, however, the at-times effective, at-times clumsily structured
crossbreed offers an engaging evening of crime cum horror.
Trailer to
The Vault:
The acting, like the movie's narrative, is a
bit uneven, but Taryn Manning (of Zombie Apocalypse [2011] and Cult [2007]) excels as Vee Dillon, the
jumpy, possibly itchy-armed sister of the trio of siblings of the 5-person team
of robbers that chooses
the wrong bank to rob, James Franco sort of sleepwalks through his role as a
bank manager who is more than he appears to be, and Q'orianka Kilcher (of Color Our of Space [2019 / trailer]) is surprisingly effective as head
teller Susan, a tertiary but nevertheless visible part that offers her the
opportunity to believably display a variety of emotions. Possibly the weakest
aspect of the film, barring the all the illogicalities that keep the narrative flowing
– you definitely will enjoy the movie more if you don't think about stuff like
logic and proportion, both of which are sloppy dead in the movie – is the film's lead actress,
Francesca Eastwood (of M.F.A. [2017
/ trailer]) as Leah Dillon, the nominal
non-leader of the robbery gang, who is undoubtedly an attractive person but
always sort of comes across like a living, breathing and usually pissed-off Barbie
doll, even after she takes off her blonde wig.
As mentioned, The Vault is a tale of a troop of five who stage a relatively
well-organized bank robbery – they got the right weapons, they got all the right
tools for any eventuality (including drilling a vault open), they got the right
outfits, they cause the right distraction – but simply choose the wrong bank:
the one they choose, reputed to be haunted we learn early on when the bank
manager explains why they have problems keeping tellers, has very little money
in its main vault. And just as tensions are about to flair and people are about
to get hurt, bank employee Ed Maas (Franco) reveals that the real money is in
the basement vault and, against the promise that "no one gets hurt",
helps the robbery proceed…
Of course, there is more in The Vault than money and once it is
open, the shit hits the fan – not just the supernatural shit, but the cops also
surround the bank because of call from the inside, a call that keeps repeating
itself over the course of the movie. And so the tension mounts: on the one
side, the tension of traditional robbery-gone-wrong-and-we-got-hostages movie,
and on the other, the tension of supernatural entities appearing and
disappearing and bad guys dying. Of course, only the two most expendable
robbers fall [bloody] victim to the supernatural — oddly quickly, actually —
while the trio of siblings, on the other hand, are continually confronted with
side-line supernatural or heist-movie scares up until the main climax of the
narrative. (After all, were they, too, to die as quickly as the characters what's-his-face
[Keith Loneker (21 June 1971 – 22 June 2017)] and what's-his-name [Michael
Milford], there
wouldn't have been much of a movie.)
For all its flaws, The Vault does offer a diverting and engaging evening of visual
entertainment, and that all the more successfully on its obviously tight budget
than, say, the average Michael Bay movie. But like most of the latter's big-budget
extravaganzas, The Vault doesn't
stay remembered all that long. Still, if The
Vault's filming budget truly was only $5,000,000,
the money was much better spent on this film than the $217
million spent on Bay's 2017 project, Transformers: The Last Knight or, for that matter, that movie's TP budget.
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