The Hurricane Heist

Dir: Rob Cohen

2018

*

Not many people know this but hurricanes are actually evil. People are most likely aware that hurricanes are destructive and that it is best not to walk into one, especially with scissors in your hand, but I certainly didn’t know that they actually went after people on purpose. Luckily Rob Cohen’s The Hurricane Heist sets the record straight and gives us the hurricane movie to end all hurricane movies – or at least one hopes. Hurricanes understand that one of the things that human beings fear the most is that large bone behind the skin of their own faces. This bone, commonly known as the skull, is the form the hurricane in The Hurricane Heist decides to take to scare our protagonists and it seems to work – even when said protagonists aren’t even looking at it. There was only one thing wrong with the 1996 film Twister and that was that it didn’t feature Bruce Campbell in the cast. This wasn’t a huge problem though as Bruce Campbell featured in Tornado! Instead, made the very same year. The problem with both films is that they aren’t the same film, although in many respects they are, so there really isn’t a problem. The problem with The Hurricane Heist however is that it isn’t particularly entertaining. It actually has more in common with the 1998 action film Hard Rain, a film that stared Christian Slater and Morgan Freeman as a couple of Armored Car guards who get caught up in a heist during a major flood. It is virtually the same film, the hurricane replacing the flood being the only significant difference. I quite liked Hard Rain, it was a guilty pleasure, but most people hated it. However, it is a bonafide masterpiece compared to Hurricane Heist. The Hurricane Heist had twenty years to copy Hard rain and improve on the story but somehow they made a worse version, even when hurricanes are blatantly more exciting than floods are. It’s big stars are Toby Kebbell and Maggie Grace – I expect more from Kebbell but it’s about right for Grace. Toby Kebbell has made a few mistakes in his career but I would argue that most of them were understandable. Andy Serkis recently took him under his wing and taught him a few things about motion capture performance which has led to a few interesting roles, most of which feature him performing as either an ape of a giant gorilla. I have to say I was a little disappointed to learn that he wasn’t going to don a motion capture suit and play the hurricane, whirling around the place like a dervish. Its an odd sort of hurricane in the end. It somehow has the power to lift cars and rip the roofs off of buildings but the inability to blow a person over or even mess up their neatly combed hair. I have a comb-over, a tasteful and convincing one I might add, so the thought of a hurricane scares the life out of me. I don’t want anyone to see my bald patch, I’m not sure why I’m so sensitive about it, I know I’m not the only one, but showing my bald patch it a little like showing people my bum, something I’d be embarrassed to do. This particular hurricane though doesn’t scare me in the slightest, I wouldn’t even need to use the half can of hairspray like I do every morning. I’m not really scared of skulls either, I have one, like most people do, right in the middle of my face, under my beautifully mosturised skin. I’m trying to think what does scare me that the hurricane could take the form of and the only things I can think of are sharks (which has been done), missed mortgage payments (which are impossible to visualise) and Kate Bush – specifically in the video of her 1978 hit Wuthering Heights. If the film was about a hurricane in the guise of Kate Bush dancing around wide-eyed in a red dress like in her video, then it would have been an odd but much better film. As it is though it is unexciting and unimpressive. The special effects are a bit of a let down when they really should have been the star of the show, and the whole three trucks thing at the end was as excruciating as going to the dentists. At one point during the film it is said that the hurricane is spinning at 600 miles per hour. I’m not weather expert but this seemed quite fast to me. After a short bit of research I found that the highest sustained wind speed ever recorded is 190 miles per hour. The Great Red Spot, the massive hurricane on Jupiter that can fit two Earths in it, is a 600 mile per hour hurricane. Now I have been known to exaggerate in the past, in fact the last count of how many times I’ve ever exaggerated is around 1 million, but for the film to big up their storm this much is a little silly. Facts and science aren’t too important in big dumb action films but they wouldn’t be that naive to think that no one would pick them up on their mistakes, especially when it is treated so seriously. At 600 miles and hour concrete would be ripped out of the ground and they’d be nothing left. It’s a dumb film, made by dummies for dummies. That said, I think even the dumbest of dummies would find it boring and I bet it isn’t something the dummies who made it are particularly proud of, especially as it bombed dramatically. We all like the big dumb action films of the mid-90s but it really is time to move on – unless you’re going to cast Dwayne Johnson. If Dwayne Johnson and/or Bruce Campbell had been in it then it would have been brilliant.