Review: Jaume Balagueró’s The Vault Cons Audiences Out of Genre Pleasure

Heist movies tend to revel in sleight of hand, misleading us into traps that seem to result from a conspiracy between the filmmakers and their story’s master criminals. That Jaume Balagueró’s The Vault presents little more than hollow echoes of the genre’s standardized but often delightful beats is illustrated by a scene that replaces the grand escape with an easy out. Our main character, scruffy young Englishman Thom (Freddie Highmore), disguised as a Spanish janitor and cornered by bank security guards in the midst of suspicious activity, suddenly speaks passable Spanish. A convenient contrivance rather than a clever reveal, this moment comes off like a hasty decision in the writers’ room.

The Vault almost appears ashamed to dwell on Thom’s abruptly revealed multilingualism, for fear of calling too much attention to how curious it is that his fellow thieves were seemingly unaware of his Spanish skills when they were planning a heist in Spain. Only a later remark from the group’s leader, Walter (Liam Cunningham), about Thom’s “hidden talents” remotely justifies their strangely muted reaction. Speaking of hidden, Walter and his multinational crew are shipwreck salvagers whose long-desired haul of sunken treasure—golden coins on which are encoded the coordinates to a larger cache buried by Sir Francis Drake—was seized by the Spanish government because they were in the latter’s national waters.

Simmering with Brexit-auguring resentment (the story is set between 2009 and 2010) at the continentals who have sapped Britain’s patrimonial wealth, Walter converts his crew into bank robbers. He recruits Thom, a recent Oxbridge graduate and purportedly brilliant mechanical engineer, to help them devise a way of breaking into a complex safe in the basement of the Bank of Spain. Thom is defined in the vaguest terms as an idealist who wants to put his genius toward good causes, and his journey from do-gooder engineer to land-lubbing privateer is as abrupt as the later revelation of his multilingualism. There’s no discernible character arc that emerges to explain or dramatize his entrée into a world of clandestine thievery: He signs up, and every once in a while, he supplies Walter’s crew with a clever idea, while the one woman in their circle, Lorraine (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), inexplicably makes eyes at him.

It’s hard to comprehend what Lorraine sees in Thom, since Balagueró appears to be using Highmore to stage some kind of extended, and ultimately unsuccessful, Kuleshov experiment. As the new initiate, Thom serves as our vantage point on The Vault’s clan of sailor-thieves, but every cut to a reaction shot of his face shows Highmore assuming the same bemused, slightly bored expression, as if Balagueró were trying to trick us into seeing something different depending on what the preceding shot was. Rather than misleading us into feeling concern or affection—as in Lev Kuleshov’s early-1920s experiments with montage—the film’s direction simply gives us no sense of this character. James (Sam Riley), the crewmember most dubious of Thom’s inclusion in their ranks, asks how it is that this English kid has transitioned from unassuming student to criminal in a matter of three days, and it’s difficult to tell whether the filmmakers are intentionally embedding this revealing self-critique into the story.

The group soon realizes that they can use the upcoming World Cup final as cover for their heist—as long as Spain makes the cut. This is a potential opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and the characters’ high-stakes gambits á la Uncut Gems, but it’s one that the film repeatedly foregoes. Spain’s victory in the semifinals plays out—and in truncated fashion after Walter flicks on the TV in his hideout—almost as soon as it’s laid out as the fulcrum on which the narrative rests. The finals game, whose flexible play-clock functions as the deadline for the heist, has a more significant role in the climax, but Balagueró doesn’t effectively or intriguingly connect the suspense of a crowd awaiting national football glory to that of a cadre of thieves attempting to reclaim Britain’s legendary lost treasure.

It’s fairly clear that Walter, who’s played with the same gruff gravitas that Cunningham brought to his role as Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones, rather than Thom, should have been the one to carry the film’s narrative weight. The aged professional looking to pull just “one more job” is a creaky enough archetype, but Cunningham actually communicates the suppressed agony caused by his stymied lifelong goal through his soft growl of a voice and icy glowering. More emphasis on a character who actually has stakes in the outcome of the bank break-in may not have made The Vault less derivative, but it would certainly be less tepid—because at least then we’d feel like we’d come away from the heist with a little something.