HIGH ROLLERS - Mark Reviews Movies

High Rollers, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 13, 2025

It's probably not a good omen that High Rollers is being released less than a year after Cash Out, its predecessor. That this is a sequel to that oddly bungling heist thriller isn't a good sign, either, but to be fair to screenwriter Chris Sivertson and returning director Ives, this follow-up is better—if only slightly so.

The movie certainly doesn't appear that way from the start, as we're reintroduced to all of the main characters from the previous story. They're a team of professional thieves, led by John Travolta's Mason Goddard, and after a mostly successful bank robbery, the crew finds themselves on a secluded beach somewhere in the world for a little rest, relaxation, and a spontaneous wedding.

The ceremony, by the way, isn't for Mason and his former undercover FBI agent girlfriend Amelia (Gina Gershon), who oversaw the police action that attempted to stop the robbery—despite the fact that everyone in the agency apparently knew she had legitimately fallen in love with Mason while infiltrating his crew in a sting operation. Let's not relitigate the utter stupidity of the previous movie, which might be part of the reason why Gershon is taking over the role from Kristin Davis, along with the fact that Amelia's character is downgraded significantly this time to a plot device.

Yes, the good times for Mason's team—including his brother Shawn (Lukas Haas), as well as the now-newlywed hacker Link (Natalia Yura) and finance expert Georgios (Swen Temmel)—end abruptly. A boat explodes offshore, which is apparently meant to be a distraction for a pair of helicopters racing toward the beach. We only know there are two helicopters because Mason randomly shouts that there are two of them, but the movie's budget clearly only allowed for one.

Anyway, a team of masked and armed men abduct Amelia and let the rest of the thieves go free. In fact, the editing magic that kind of suggests there might be two choppers in the air also allows for Mason to suddenly teleport into a car in order to chase Amelia's captors—in what is obviously a completely different part of the world than the beach where everyone just was.

None of this bodes well, because the first movie also seemed to be making up the plot, the logistics of the heist, and everything else about the narrative as it went. Thankfully, Sivertson does have some simple, straightforward, and mostly coherent story in mind for our protagonists this time. That's not too impressive of a storytelling feat, of course, but compared to the previous movie and this one's prologue, it's some kind of accomplishment.

The basics of that plot put Mason and his team in the middle of a battle between two crime lords. On one side, there's Salazar (Danny Pardo), whose dirty secrets the crew were trying to steal in the previous story.

He's not happy with Mason and his fellow thieves, of course, but since they're so good at what they do, Salazar is now coercing them to steal something from his rival crime boss Zade Black (Demián Castro). The mysterious thing is located in a safe inside the penthouse suite of Black's casino, which doesn't look nearly as impressive as the wealthy and ruthless mobster/shrimp magnate's reputation would suggest. If that's the most glaring inconsistency for a while in this story, however, we should be grateful.

The rest of the plot has the team pretending to be other people, in order to get close to Black, figure out how best to distract him and his security forces, and determine how to access the penthouse and open the safe. Travolta's still-strong charm was the highlight of the previous movie, and he's still having fun with the role here. The rest of the cast members, who also include Quavo and Noel G. as the remainder of Mason's crew, are vaguely amusing in their still-archetypical roles. It's enough, at least, to keep us from thinking too much about how strange it is that no one inside the casino finds it suspicious that Mason, pretending to be a reclusive billionaire, regularly walks around with, talks to, and has long meetings in rooms with his crew, assuming the guises of complete strangers to the guy.

Before a climax that reminds us of Ives' inability to stage action (lots of drone shots of people running up and down the same stairs over and over, for example), High Rollers plays as a battle of wits between Mason and Black. The easy joke, obviously, is that there's little intelligence to the characters or their plan for that fight to be satisfying, but since we know how awful this could have been from the previous movie, this sequel is somewhat an improvement.

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