In The Vault, college student Thom (Freddie Highmore) is labeled a “boy genius,” yet when he’s hired by a secretive team of treasure hunters to help them break into an impenetrable bank, one of the first things he does is perform an online search for “most secure vault in the world.” That’s emblematic of the level of sophistication to be found in The Vault, which embraces every dumb heist cliché but doesn’t bother establishing its characters’ personalities or coherently explaining their motivations.
The team is led by Walter Moreland (Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham), who runs a salvage business and seems to have no heist experience whatsoever. The Vault opens with Walter and his crew retrieving sunken treasure off the coast of Spain, from a ship that went down in 1645. Before they can get back to shore, they’re surrounded by Spanish authorities, who seize the cargo and declare it property of the Spanish government. Back in London, Walter appeals to his MI6 contact (Famke Janssen, with a bad wig and a bad accent), but she says that her hands are tied.
So obviously the solution is a heist, which Walter continues to refer to as “salvage.” For some reason, he decides that Thom is the only person who can solve the problem of getting into the vault at the Bank of Spain, the aforementioned “most secure vault in the world” that is protected by mysterious countermeasures that no one has cracked in more than 80 years. Thom is an engineering hot shot who is being courted by big oil companies but really want to put his skills to use making the world a better place.
Walter recruits Thom via an unnecessarily elaborate scheme that culminates in them just sitting in a pub having a beer, after Thom abandons his disapproving father in the middle of dinner. It’s not clear how Walter’s heist plan fits into Thom’s worldview, but Thom immediately agrees to join the crew, possibly so that he can spend more time with Walter’s attractive associate Lorraine (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey). Once the entire team is assembled in Madrid, Thom proves his worth by solving an extremely obvious problem that has nothing to do with engineering.
The Vault is full of that kind of boneheaded plotting, presenting supposedly intricate, complex challenges that turn out to be basic and predictable. “What do I look like, Danny Ocean?” Thom asks Walter during their first meeting, but there’s nothing in The Vault that’s remotely as witty or clever as anything in the entire Ocean’s franchise. There’s a lot of busywork, including an exploratory infiltration of the bank, as the team gets ready for the main heist, but the five credited screenwriters never bother with character development during that time.
It’s hard to even understand why Walter is willing to go to such extraordinary illegal lengths to recover the treasure, which is said to contain coins with coordinates for yet another buried treasure, hidden by famous pirate Sir Francis Drake. There’s a half-hearted romance between Thom and Lorraine, although the actors have no chemistry, and there’s a pointless rivalry between Thom and short-tempered former British government operative James (Sam Riley), who disapproves of Thom’s presence on the team.
Those character don’t get any personality traits that aren’t in relation to Thom, though, and Thom himself remains a bit inscrutable, since The Vault never returns to his frustrations with school or with his father. He’s just fully, immediately on board with the crew, and the filmmakers then shift to crafting the tediously detailed heist, which involves numerous seemingly irrelevant steps to get the team members in place to steal Drake’s coins.
Director Jaume Balaguero is known for his work in horror movies, especially the [REC] series, but the attempt here to build up the bank’s head of security (Jose Coronado) as a worthy adversary falls flat. He’s just a slightly intense guy doing his job, and he’s fully in the right in his efforts to protect his place of employment. It’s hard to root for The Vault’s protagonists, actually, since they don’t seem driven by any noble impulses, and that makes the inevitable third-act betrayal by one of the team members into an empty gesture.
There isn’t even much suspense in the main heist sequence, which takes place during the 2010 World Cup final. That seemingly random period setting exists mainly to provide a distraction for the team to use as cover, and nothing about The Vault connects to the social context of 2010 or to Spain’s position in the soccer tournament. The dodgy CGI effects don’t enhance the suspense or action, either, and the plot’s logical leaps make it hard to feel a sense of danger for the characters.
Highmore has been playing variations on the “boy genius” since he was an actual boy, and he doesn’t bring anything new to the character type. Cunningham has the right gravitas as the team’s leader, but Riley is more petulant than menacing as Thom’s antagonist. The rest of the actors have so little to work with that they barely even register. They’re just cogs in the machine for The Vault’s tiresome clockwork storytelling.
Starring Freddie Highmore, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Liam Cunningham, Sam Riley, Luis Tosar, Axel Stein, Jose Coronado and Famke Janssen, The Vault opens Friday, March 26 in select theaters and on VOD.
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