Cash Out

What do you need for a good heist movie? To start with, you need a good cast, with a lead or two who can sell their cooler-than-ice personas. Next, you need some good misdirects—things can never appear to be going as you think they are. These are some of the things I look for, but they are not always required to deliver something entertaining; sometimes a good movie is simply a good movie. That brings me to Cash Out, a heist movie starring John Travolta as a master thief, where a job looks to have gone wrong, and now he and his crew just need to focus on staying alive.

Success is not the word on Manson’s (John Travolta) latest job, as it seems he has been set up. He and Amelia (Kristin Davis) are posing as a couple who are rubbing elbows with the rich on a tarmac at some location. The target is an expensive and rare car, and everything seems to have worked perfectly. That is until the cops are on them rather quickly, and Amelia confesses she works for the F.B.I. and they should give up. Mason instead goes to plan B, and he and his crew get away. Fast forward three months, and Mason is retired, staying off the grid, but his brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) has talked their crew into a job with a big payday, but he might be over his head. To add to the problems, Amelia is the negotiator who has been brought in—can you say awkward? Mason, though, might have an ace up his sleeve, but will it be enough to save everyone he cares about?

Written by Dipo Oseni and Doug Richardson, Cash Out tries to deliver a puzzle for you to solve; the problem is, it won’t take long for you to utter the words “I don’t care.” While I don’t always need all the information for me to get into a movie, some would help, especially in Cash Out’s case. The story skips out on any type of planning scenes, which is not such a big deal, but it also skips out on spending any time with Mason and his crew. That decision leaves you not having any care in the world about what happens to them, except Travolta, because hey, you know him. As for maybe some good action to save the film, Cash Out doesn’t really have that, instead filling our time with conversations, threats, and banter that end up leading nowhere.

Cash Out definitely doesn’t deliver the promise of its title, because if you paid anything for this, you are definitely losing out. Some guy named Ives is listed as the director, but he seems to have appeared out of nowhere, as well as watching Michael Bay’s “Ambulance” too many times and thinking it needed more drone shots. Ives goes hard on the use of drones, so much so you can often see the actors ducking to avoid them as they fly around them. That though, is not the film’s worst crime, as the two credited writers have no feel for twists and turns, as these have no snap. This is a pretty boring viewing experience, but someone has faith in it, as Cash Out 2 appears to be already in the can, I guess with plans to rule the V.O.D. market? The good news is the only direction this series has to go is up, because this current form of cash is not accepted here.