Writers: Rafa Martinez, Andrés M. Koppel, Borja Glez. Santaollala, Michel Gaztambide, Rowan Athale
Director: Jaume Balagueró
The Royal Bank of Spain’s underground vault is famous both for the quantities of gold it stores and for its legendary security system. Should intruders trigger it, a 16-ton door will seal them into the vault. To add to the horror, this also activates an immediate flood of water which fills the space. Jaume Balagueró isn’t the first film maker to imagine a fictional heist of this real-life vault. It was the thrilling focus of Season Three of Alex Pina’s massively successful Netflix series, Money Heist (2017-2021).
What does Balagueró bring to the party? The Vault is certainly a slick, expensively made adventure, with impressive cinematograpy and special effects for which it won a Spanish Goya award. But the set up is questionable. The presiding spirit of the film, somewhat improbably, is Sir Francis Drake, Elizabethan adventurer and privateer. Criminal mastermind, Walter (Liam Cunningham), see himself as twenty-first century incarnation of Drake, fearlessly seeking Spanish gold from old shipwrecks. For thirty years he has dived wrecks in search of three golden medals on which Drake supposedly etched the secret co-ordinates of his buried treasure. Finally recovered off the coast of Spain, the medals are seized by Spanish authorities and locked in the Royal Bank’s vault. The international court of The Hague rules in Spain’s favour.
In the way of all heists, Walter now seeks to assemble a crack team to achieve the impossible – to break into the bank where the rigged vault is ready to drown all intruders. The action moves to Cambridge where Thom, a fresh-faced engineering genius, is being wooed by heads of multi-national oil companies. Unimpressed by talk of vast salaries, Thom is intrigued by Walter’s very different job offer. Admittedly it involves criminality – lending his engineering wizardry to aid a spectacularly dangerous heist – but the idea of solving hitherto intractable engineering problems really appeals. Plus Walter does his Francis Drake number on him – this isn’t so much stealing as salvaging something to which Spain has no right, he insists. Passion is the only important thing.
The success of heist movies depends not just on a tense, twisty plot and special effects, which The Vault ably delivers. It needs sharply drawn characters and witty dialogue. The Vault’s team of script writers tend to use pretty broad brush strokes. Thom’s central quality, apart from his much-mentioned genius, is sheer niceness. Freddie Highmore, as Thom, is excellent at putting on a look of beatific vision whenever he works out yet another genius solution. Of the other characters, Walter is steely, Spanish Simon an ardent football supporter, Klaus the computer genius repeatedly tucks into a bag of crisps and scowling James is perpetually antagonistic to the newcomer. Guess which one will turn out to be the bad apple? The role of lone female gang member, Lorraine, played winningly by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, is to turn up in different wigs and accents and deploy charm. There is an entertaining scene in which she poses as an art restorer, getting the bank’s dozy chairman to leave her alone in his office with his Goya portrait, thereby enabling her to access the hidden safe.
From here on it’s all exciting action. It’s a nifty idea to set the story during the final thrilling stages of the 2010 World Cup, so we are shown huge crowds of fans regularly assembling in Cibeles Square, close to the bank, to watch on the giant screen. The final which Spain will win, gives the gang the opportunity it needs to make the raid on the vault, as all security cameras will all be trained on the crowd.
The Vault is watchable in its glossiness and pace, but the sketch characterisation doesn’t match up. Do we need the sequel to which the ending knowingly points?
Signature Entertainment presents The Vault on Digital Platforms 7th March
https://youtu.be/K8KvgFdh1Uo
