The Hur­ri­cane Heist

The first thing you learn at Film Crit­ic School is that all art is sub­jec­tive: one man’s trash is anoth­er man’s trea­sure, let he who is with­out sin write the first hit piece, yad­da yad­da. Some tastemak­ers, secure in their ivory tow­ers, enjoy being pre­sent­ed with an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be mali­cious towards those that bare their soul in some furi­ous cin­e­mat­ic under­tak­ing. But most of us go in hop­ing that what we’re about to see will – at the very least – not be a com­plete waste of time. For the sheer amount of hys­ter­i­cal, non-sen­si­cal enjoy­ment it deliv­ers, Rob ​“The Fast and the Furi­ous” Cohen’s ludi­crous lat­est pass­es this most basic metric.

In the film’s open­ing sequence, an Alaba­man father-of-two attempts to out­pace an oncom­ing hur­ri­cane (not the hur­ri­cane, mind) with his two young sons. Broth­ers Breeze (Ryan Kwan­ten) and Will Rut­ledge (Toby Kebbell) bick­er as impend­ing doom swirls ever closed, even­tu­al­ly clos­ing in on them in a very lit­er­al ren­der­ing of pathet­ic fal­la­cy, as the hur­ri­cane assumes the shape of a skull. Cut to sev­er­al years in the future and Breeze is a hard-drink­ing rough-liv­ing mechan­ic, while Will is a skit­tish mete­o­rol­o­gist who appar­ent­ly – owing to the trau­ma of his ear­ly child­hood – now has a fear of hurricanes.

This doesn’t stop him dri­ving around in a giant Bat­mo­bile-esque storm­chas­ing vehi­cle he calls The Dom­i­na­tor. With anoth­er big olé hur­ri­cane on the hori­zon, he tries to con­vince Breeze to leave town with him. Mean­while, a group of né’er-do-wells (led by Ralph Ine­son) plot to relieve a near­by US Trea­sury build­ing of $600m, using the hur­ri­cane as a dis­trac­tion (that’s it! That’s The Hur­ri­cane Heist!). It’s up to tough-talkin’ dis­graced trea­sury agent Casey Cor­byn (Mag­gie Grace) and the Rut­ledge Bros to stop them.

Now, there’s a lot that goes down dur­ing The Hur­ri­cane Heist, from a man being killed by an errant hub­cap to a lengthy expo­si­tion-based con­ver­sa­tion that takes place while Will and Casey are uri­nat­ing by a tree. There’s also a curi­ous scene where it is revealed that Will keeps a week’s worth of bagged and labelled-by-day peanut but­ter-and-jel­ly sand­wich­es in The Dominator’s glove­box. Rather than ques­tion this bor­der­line psy­chopath behav­iour, Casey decides to quiz him on his pre­ferred brand of peanut butter.

Yet Cohen is clear­ly tak­ing every­thing very, very seri­ous­ly. Every line of dia­logue is spo­ken with a fur­rowed brow, includ­ing a per­son­al high­light: ​“Don’t you get it? They had a plan with­in the plan with­in the plan the whole time!” Anoth­er mem­o­rable scene sees Will and Casey teth­ered to ropes, bob­bing around in the windy sky like flim­sy paper kites. Such a fail­ing to recog­nise its own ridicu­lous­ness ren­ders The Hur­ri­cane Heist a bril­liant­ly bom­bas­tic dis­play of arro­gance. Like watch­ing Trump threat­en to phys­i­cal­ly fight Joe Biden.

From the details out­lined above, you may be left with ques­tions includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to:

• Why would any­one – par­tic­u­lar­ly a group of crim­i­nals with access to high spec tech and weapons – think it was a good idea to stage a heist dur­ing a hurricane?
• Why does Casey care if some­one steals mon­ey from the US gov­ern­ment, who are almost cer­tain­ly insured against theft?
• Why would par­ents name their first son ​‘Breeze’ and then call their sec­ond ​‘Will’?

But to ques­tion The Hur­ri­cane Heist is to ques­tion the very fab­ric of real­i­ty: it’s best accept­ed as some­thing that sim­ply is. Like Big Broth­er or the Atom­ic Bomb, per­haps it’s best to Stop Wor­ry­ing, and Learn To Love our bleak, cap­i­tal­ist cur­rent, in which $35m is spunked away cre­at­ing a noisy, baf­fling, unin­ten­tion­al­ly amus­ing B‑movie that’s head­ed straight for the mil­len­ni­al equiv­a­lent of direct-to-video.