Let’s be honest: “The Vault” wants to be your next favorite heist movie, but it can’t even manage to lift your pulse. Directed by Jaume Balagueró, this Spanish exercise in genre mimicry gathers up all the usual suspects—plucky prodigy, world-weary ringleader, hacker-by-numbers—and puts them through a series of motions so familiar, you could swear you’ve wandered into a bank robbery rehearsal dinner.
Freddie Highmore, usually the boy genius with a haunted stare, is here as Thom, engineering wunderkind bored of the corporate rat race, so obviously he leaps at the chance to join a team of accidental strangers (stranger in appearance than in personality) for a “thrilling” job cracking the vaunted Bank of Spain. Liam Cunningham, who can normally summon charisma from the bottom of a whiskey glass, uses all his talent trying to animate Walter, a mastermind so enigmatic he barely registers a heartbeat.
Their crew? Well, they could have been cut from international heist movie stock footage: the slippery con artist, a sullen hacker, a gruff logistics man, the ex-MI6 professional trying very hard not to look bored. Nobody stands out because the script doesn’t want them to. Deep down, you know this gang could be swapped out for IKEA mannequins and the film would slouch forward unchanged.
From the get-go, “The Vault” pretends at cleverness. There’s the “treasure of Guadalupe”—which enters the story like a forgotten trivia fact—and a vault that threatens to flood with the faintest shift of weight, the sort of contrived high-stakes engineering that only a room full of screenwriters could dream up after too many espressos. Our heroes scheme with liquid nitrogen and truly boggling cocktail science, as if cleverness could be faked by simply listing lab equipment.
But what’s missing isn’t a trick, or even suspense: it’s just basic human connection. Balagueró’s camera keeps pushing in as if to find something going on behind those faces, but there’s nothing there—no wounds, no loyalties, no friction, no joy in the job. Ask me the names or secrets of these characters an hour later, and all I’d manage is a vague recollection of anxious typing and furrowed brows.
Who can blame me? Even the film’s weighty themes—trust, ambition, morality—are only there to add ballast, not direction. By the time it hints at philosophical depth, you’re already ahead, predicting every move like a tired chess player. The story itself lets out an exhausted sigh after the first act and never recovers. Instead, it lumbers through feints at tension, only to topple into a climax signposted in neon: “No Surprises Here.” When the final tease for a sequel dangles onscreen, it’s less an invitation than a dare—would you really come back for more of this?
If you want to know what a heist movie should do, you look elsewhere—to “Money Heist,” which at least remembers that audiences crave not only clever twists, but actual emotional investment, the feeling that lives and relationships might hang in the balance. “The Vault” thinks cold professionalism will suffice, but all it manages is to freeze out any chance of genuine suspense.
What it all amounts to is cinematic faint praise: “The Vault” works hard to be inoffensive, and lands squarely on the other side of relevance. Not bad enough to be memorable, not bold enough to love or hate. The real con here isn’t the theft onscreen—it’s how the movie quietly picks your pocket of two hours, then slips away with a wink, as if you should thank it for its politeness.
For a genre obsessed with daring, “The Vault” is a study in caution. If we ever get the sequel the closing credits dream of, my only hope is someone nicks a little actual character, a little real risk—something worth the price of admission, or at least the price of a good getaway. Because the only thing “The Vault” expertly cracks is the code to being utterly, impeccably generic.
