Freddie Highmore of The Good Doctor, Finding Neverland and Bates Motel fame is not the first acting name which springs to mind when it comes to an action/thriller film. Not slagging the young actor but he has built a career on playing the cute kid and then the quirky young man type characters. Well, The Vault is the film to break that way of thinking. An attempt to show that he can play a wider variety of characters than we might have previously thought. But once you start watching it you will see that he is pretty much playing the type of character he plays on The Good Doctor. A brilliant engineer who might be somewhere on the spectrum.
Okay, introduction to review done and dusted. Highmore is playing against type here but the film is not necessarily the greatest. Not the worst, but not the best. At its center is a group of young people putting in motion a high-stakes heist taking place underneath the Bank of Spain. A lost treasure sought after by a group of highly skilled thieves who are using the World Cup as cover.
Besides the always steady Freddie Highmore, you also get well-known faces like Famke Janssen from several Z-Men films, Liam Cunningham from Game of Thrones and Sam Riley from the Maleficent films. Rounding out the thievery group is Spanish actress Astrid Berges-Frisbey, who you might recognize from films like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Pirates of Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
Right off the top, be warned that the film clocks in right around two hours long. A tad too long in my opinion. The film’s editor and director Jaume Balaguero should have shown more restraint and it would have kept the pace up and tension flowing a little better.
Storywise it is a decent one. Requires that you pay attention as it is rather intelligently rendered. You will spend most of your time watching it trying to figure out how they are going to bring this to a satisfactory ending. A good sign for a thriller. You are invested. Plus wisely they have set things up for another go at it or a sequel.
A strange decision is to have chosen not to insert subtitles when characters are speaking Spanish. Odd…
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-Digital Copy