Recent history is littered with crime thrillers that gather together a bevvy of recognizable names and drop them into a convoluted scheme predicated on scoring a lucrative job that inevitably goes awry, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one that boasts a more peculiar and altogether bizarre ensemble than 2015’s Heist.
The story is about as formulaic as it gets, and understandably came under fire for being a brazen ripoff of Speed, with a father struggling to find the money to fund his daughter’s medical treatment. Turning to criminality, he buddies up with a ragtag group of thieves to pull a job on a casino, but their getaway ends up with them hijacking a city bus with their enemies in hot pursuit.
The one area where Heist actually managed to deliver was its title, because there is indeed a heist. Besides that, the film was generally panned by critics and shunned by audiences, but the incredibly random assortment of star power peppered throughout is more than worthy of generating at least the slightest shred of curious interest.
Among the stars to feature are living legend Robert De Niro, former Saved by the Bell heartthrob Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dave Bautista, Gina Carano, Dougray Scott, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kate Bosworth, and Morris Chestnut, a cavalcade of random folks that you’d never expect to see together in the same feature.
That might be why the otherwise forgettable Heist has somehow managed to hijack the streaming charts this weekend, with FlixPatrol revealing it to be one of the top-viewed titles on the Starz global charts. Carano and De Niro together, who’d have thought?