Mark Reviews Movies: THE VAULT (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 25, 2021

The real star of The Vault doesn't show up until the movie's climax. It is, as the title suggests, the eponymous vault, deep beneath the grand building of the Bank of Spain and magnificent in its own way. The characters here talk a lot about the building and, more importantly, the vault itself, of course, since they're planning to break into it. The thing, with all of its obstacles and security measures and some ingenious kind of failsafe if all of the barriers somehow fail, feels like an imposing force, an impossible challenge, and a locale worthy of some dread by the time the thieves arrive there.

In the meantime, there is the rest of the movie with which to deal. It's serviceable in some ways, far too familiar in many others, and just shallow and contrived enough that most of the story feels like a long, delaying build-up to the big show.

The story actually begins in the depths of the ocean, where a salvaging team, led by Walter Moreland (Liam Cunningham), finds a long-thought-lost treasure: some belonging to—well, stolen by—the 16th century privateer Francis Drake. The British vessel, in an act of some historical irony, is stopped by Spanish authorities, and the treasure, stolen from Spanish ships in the first place, is sent to the Bank of Spain in Madrid, awaiting a study of its contents.

Soon after, Walter, by way of his surrogate daughter Lorraine (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), summons wunderkind Thom (Freddie Highmore) from Cambridge University. Thom is an engineering genius, currently being scouted by all of the major oil corporations for his clever, effective design to stop an oil spill. He wants to help people, not global conglomerates, with his talents. When Walter requests his help to find a way into the Bank of Spain and its long-secure vault in order to retrieve the re-stolen treasure (which could lead to even more treasure), curiosity and the challenge of the endeavor get Thom to Madrid.

The rest of this story, of course, should be pretty obvious by now. We meet the rest of Walter's crew, consisting of a tech expert (played by Axel Stein) who snacks and cracks jokes while sitting in front of a series of computer monitors, a guy who can get anything named Simon (Luis Tosar), and the wildcard of the group, an antagonistic expert diver/former state operative named James (Sam Riley). A few of them are skeptical of Thom's presence, since he doesn't have any desire to actually commit the robbery, but he proves himself by hacking into the bank's security system with a single phone call.

Being able to monitor the bank's security cameras is just the start. The team has to get into the bank, gain access to control the cameras, and copy a couple of keys to get into underground areas where the vault is housed.

This results in a fairly dynamic sequence of multiple disguises, moving parts, and close calls. The screenplay, penned by no fewer than five writers, may be a series of archetypical characters (defined entirely by their skills and attitudes), familiar setups and payoffs, and some races against the clock, but director Jaume Balagueró shows off some finesse in this sequence and the climax.

There's a kind of procedural efficiency to the multi-part setpiece, as Simon, disguised as a cleaner, tries to install a hack into the security system and Lorraine, pretending to be an art appraiser, attempts to copy some sizeable keys before anyone notices. The tech guy, of course, uses the old trick of looping footage for her to get the job finished, and Thom gets a last-second save that impresses everyone. The parts to this sequence are routine, but how those parts move is more important than their foundational elements.

Most of this story, alas, isn't about such sequences. Instead, it's about the planning, the solving of the central riddle of the vault's failsafe, some more planning, and a lot of empty back-and-forth between the thieves. We even get an antagonist, in the person of the bank's suspicious head of security Gustavo (Jose Coronado), and a countdown clock, in the form of soccer games that have the city distracted—as long as the national team stays in the competition. The thieves leave a lot of this plan to chance, but then again, only one of them makes the obvious connection between their occupation as divers and the giant tank of water that serves as the vault's deadliest security measure. If that connection seems like a no-brainer, it probably says something that none of the screenwriters took it into consideration.

When the big robbery arrives, the sequence is torn between admiration for the vault's construction—as well as its re-creation by the filmmakers—and the fact that we have little reason to care about the mission's success or failure. There are obstacles and perils galore, all of which Balagueró again stages with some skill, but with the only grounding for these challenges being procedural, The Vault ultimately feels too routine.

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