It’s hard out there for a dad. You go to work, do your job—which, in this case, seems to entail working as some sort of low-level employee in Robert De Niro’s casino—and yet you can’t afford to pay for your daughter’s medical treatment. So, you take the next logical step: You get a gun, steal his money, and…hijack a bus, apparently. Following in the proud footsteps of Denzel Washington in John Q, only with a hefty helping of Speed and Ocean’s 11 added, Jeffrey Dean Morgan stars in Heist as the father pushed to extreme measures in this somewhat goofy-looking thriller. (Along with the generic and oft-used title—it’s being called Bus 657 in other countries, which you may have noticed yesterday, before the international trailer was pulled—this trailer really wants you to remember earlier, probably better, heist films.) Despite the presence of notable names like De Niro, Morris Chestnut, Gina Carano, and others, the whole thing comes across like a weird rehash of actions movies gone by. Morgan’s a uniformly terrific actor, so here’s hoping he can rescue this film from its seemingly inevitable bargain-bin fate.
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