CASH OUT - Mark Reviews Movies

Cash Out, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 25, 2024

Nobody seems to know what they're doing in Cash Out. That can be said of the characters, some of whom kind of fall into a bank heist with seemingly no preparation and others who try to stop the robbers with an obvious problem in front of them that no one acknowledges. It can also be said of the filmmakers, who seem to be piecing together the plot and the action scene by scene.

It's one of those one-last-job stories for Mason, a career criminal played by John Travolta, who still shows a bit of the old swagger here. Actually, the movie amounts to two one-last-job stories for the character, and without giving away too much of the predictable course of this plot, it's kind of amusing that someone could edit together the bulk of the prologue and most of the epilogue of this movie, cut out everything that happens in between, and still have basically the same, complete story. It would be much shorter, of course, but unfortunately, we're provided no such favor here.

Mason and his team of professional thieves first infiltrate some kind of private sale for the wealthiest of the wealthy at a small airport. What is this event? It's never clear, except that a bunch of super-rich people with private jets have come to maybe look at other jets to buy, but also, one of those ultra-wealthy people has brought a sampling of his expensive sports car collection along with him.

It's almost pointless to question his motives, since the guy also lets Mason and Amelia (Kristin Davis), his partner in crime and love, just get into the rarest of the vehicles, start the engine, and drive off with the car because the lights go out in the hangar. The man has security guards, but one imagines they're off-screen looking at their boss as if this is a problem he has needlessly created for himself.

Anyway, it turns out that Amelia is an undercover FBI agent and has let the feds know about Mason's plan. The professional crook escapes arrest by having his brother and fellow thief Shawn (Lukas Haas) drive the truck carrying the sports car into the shallow end of a lake. Apparently, the feds don't feel like getting their gear wet, because they just let the team swim away and presume that Mason has died.

Given this level of incompetency, it's little wonder the FBI lets Amelia, who has admitted to her superiors that she was legitimately in a romantic relationship with her target, work as a negotiator when Mason turns up alive and tries to rob a bank only a few months later. Yes, that's actually established here, so apparently, federal law enforcement agencies have some kind of policy of overlooking an obvious conflict of both interest and loyalty if an agent says falling in love with a career criminal she has been tasked to bring to justice was "just a mistake."

If one can ignore that massive gap in logic, the rest of Dipo Oseni and Doug Richardson's screenplay isn't much better. Mason and Shawn, as well as tech whiz Link (Natali Yura) and muscle Hector (Noel G.) and other guy Anton (Quavo), are trying to steal a crypto wallet from a safe deposit box. As it turns out, there's nothing in the box.

Conveniently, this bank just keeps increasing in size and scope in every other scene or so. It has a little lobby, but the building also has a massive conference room to keep the hostages, multiple flights of stairs, an entire expanse of cubicle-filled office space, and a top-secret secondary building down the street. First-time director Ives' apparent philosophy about the geography of the heist is that there must be spaces in which the action can take place, regardless of any sense that any of these spaces are connected and actually make up the layout of a real building. The constantly moving camera only lets us see how little effort has been put into making these assorted rooms look like a functioning place of business (Those cubicles are completely empty, for example).

The actors try their best to add some personality to this shallow affair, as Travolta and Davis flirtatious banter over the radio (No one, even a guy sitting right behind her in one scene, thinks this is worthy of suspicion?), while the rest play their archetypical criminals with a bit of charm. Cash Out, though, is a cheap production, made as hastily and with as little thought as possible.

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