Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Heist 88’ on Showtime, a Dullsville Heist Flick That’s a Waste of Courtney B. Vance’s Talent

Heist 88 (now streaming on Showtime) is a loose BOATS (Based On A True Story) drama, and I say “loose” because it’s less “based on” and more “inspired by” an audacious Chicago bank heist that took place in 1988. As a lengthy title card tells us, that was before banking was computerized, and big-money wire transfers were performed via a relatively primitive system in which involved parties exchanged a transfer code during a telephone call. (Hey, remember telephone calls? They were awesome.) Courtney B. Vance of Law and Order and The People v. O.J. Simpson fame leads the cast, playing the mastermind of the scheme – and he may be the best thing about it, for better or worse.

HEIST 88: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We begin with a scene near the ending of the movie, which means we get one of those flash-forward scenes – Jeremy Horne (Vance) walks up to a bank teller and requests for an $80 million transfer to a bank in Geneva – that soon jumps back to the actual beginning of the movie, signified by a title card that reads THREE WEEKS EARLIER. Jeremy attends a 10-year-anniversary memorial service for his brother, and runs into his nephew Marshall (Bentley Green). The 20-something kid has big dreams of being a record producer, but is $10k in debt to a loan shark, so he’s lucky he ran into his rich-as-hell uncle, right? Heh. I dunno about that, because we know what Marshall doesn’t, that Jeremy has a tracker on his ankle and is a few weeks away from being thrown into the slammer. There’s a reason why Marshall’s dad always told him to stay away from Uncle Jeremy.

But they get lunch anyway. Turns out that Marshall has three pals who work crappy low-level minimum-wage office jobs at one of Chicago’s biggest banks: LaDonna (Precious Way), Danny (Xavier Clyde) and Rick (Nican Robinson). You’d think people who oversee important tasks like clearing checks and OKing multimillion-dollar wire transfers would earn more than $3.35 an hour, but you’d be wrong (and probably not surprised either). When Jeremy finds out what these young people do for a living, you can just hear the gears in his brain click into place and start whirring. Unc writes Marshall a check for $10 grand and says ominously, “Now you’re in control – and now you work for me.” 

Jeremy gathers all four of them at his hideout – in a warehouse or wherever; all the places in movies where criminals concoct convoluted heist plans look like the abandoned backroom of a cardboard box factory – and drops a doozy: They’re going to stick it to the man by robbing tens of millions of dollars from the bank. He’s already spied on them, and knows they’re all struggling financially and dealing with crummy living situations, so they’re relatively easy to convince to R-U-N-N-O-F-T to Geneva with a dozen million bucks or so. And they’re not going to waltz in with guns and ski masks; no, they’re going to learn how to fake the voices of specific rich people and therefore defraud them by performing phony wire transfers. Is this is a plan so crazy, it just might work? Yes, I think it just might be a plan so crazy, it just might work!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Heist 88 is like a Danny Ocean heist film if it was less about doing crazy things like replacing priceless faberge eggs with phony ones, and more about doing a hilarious impression of a rich SUTH-uhn White person making a phone call. 

Performance Worth Watching: Vance? A class act, as always. Even when the material is as drab as a set of lightly stained beige curtains. 

Memorable Dialogue: Jeremy’s mantra: “The system needs to be tested.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Heist 88’s clunky-ass script and amateurish editing and direction do it no favors. The core story sounds fascinating: A greedy misanthrope uses racial and political motives to manipulate desperate young people into executing his audacious little scheme. Justifying her turn toward a life of crime, LaDonna says, “I call it payback for being born Black,” and that juicy, righteous motivation, which Jeremy frames as a quasi-Robin Hood rob-from-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor story, just hangs in the air, waiting for someone to do something with it. Well, it never happens; Heist 88 is more interested in adhering to the bare pragmatism of this story than stirring up any thoughtful subtext or having the characters recite dialogue that isn’t a Mad Libs of cliches – the old groaner of a phrase “real as a heart attack” is deployed twice in this 80-minute movie, which is two times too many.

So director Menhaj Huda and writer Dwayne Johnson-Cochran leave a lot of points on the table, crafting boilerplate supporting characters – two played by vets Keith David and Keesha Sharp are so underedeveloped, they’re barely worth mentioning – around Vance, who’s never given much of an opportunity to explore Jeremy’s psychological motives. He just wants to steal some money, cut his ankle bracelet and jet to Europe a rich man. Vance speaks with softspoken authority, and although it’s a mildly chilling performance, there’s not much to the guy. It doesn’t help that so many scenes come off laughably silly; at one point, Jeremy disarms a couple of muggers with such ruthless efficiency, you’d think Batman himself was his mentor. You’ll roll your eyes and be tempted to turn the movie off before it even gets to its boilerplate, medium-suspenseful high-tension climax, when our morally compromised antiheroes adopt ridiculous voices and make some scintillating phone calls. This might be the most boring movie heist ever put to film.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Sorry, but Heist 88 takes a potentially rich and compelling story and shapes it into a series of dull cliches.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.