Sometimes it's more fun to root for the villains than it is the heroes. John Travolta headlines the cast of Cash Out, a new heist movie where things go wrong for a group of con-men and robbers when they get caught inside a carefully laid trap.
Cash Out begins with Travolta, playing the kindly criminal Mason Goddard, flying into a private jet sale along with his beautiful 'wife' Amy (Kristin Davis) on their own private plane, sipping champagne and living the high life. However, the two of them are not part of the one percent as their host believes, and they manage to talk their way into being shown their hosts private car collection. With the help of their support team, they're able to steal some hugely valuable vehicles and make a daring getaway. However, it turns out the FBI are waiting for them, and that they knew about the job because Amy is an undercover agent. Whilst the group are able to escape, the damage has been done as Amy's betrayal breaks Mason's heart after their two year romance.
Jumping forward a few months, Mason is approached by his brother Shawn (Lukas Haas), who has a plan to rob a Miami bank. Mason tells him to forget the job, but when he gets a call from another of the crew he realises his younger brother has gone ahead with things. Rushing to the bank to try and stop his crew from making a mistake, Mason and the others are forced to take everyone hostage when Shawn messes things up. Now, trapped inside the bank, they have to figure out a way to escape whilst dealing with the FBI negotiator, Amy.
There's a degree of charm to Cash Out that keeps the movie from being bad, and it's chiefly down to the interactions between its main leads Travolta and Davis. The two of them have an easy energy, a casual way of talking to each other that makes it feel like there's an established relationship between them, and you can buy that they were together for two years. The way that they slip into easy conversation despite the circumstances of the situation is almost comedic, but the film never veers into full comedy territory with it, and instead it ends up bringing a small smile to your face. This same charm follows Travolta throughout the movie in the way that he bonds with the other members of his team, as well as how he deals with the hostages.
The downside to this easy energy is that the film often feels like it lacks any real punch. Travolta is sometimes a bit too relaxed, and almost feels like he's phoning it in at times. There's a point in the movie where he has to run down an escaped hostage to prevent them getting out of the bank and ruining everything and he never goes beyond a mild jog. Considering that losing this key hostage would potentially lead to either prison time or being shot by law enforcement you'd think he'd be running as fast as he could, but instead Mason looks like he's jogging to catch the bus rather than running for his life.
This is something that happens elsewhere in the movie, this feeling of lack of any real tension. Things escalate towards the end of the film, with a twist in the tale that takes things from a simple bank robbery into a more dangerous territory, and we're told that the crew's lives are in more danger than ever before. But I never really felt it. We're told that it's life or death, but the film didn't really show that. Now, this does mean that Cash Out makes for some pretty easy viewing, it's low stakes and low violence for much of the time, but it also means that you never feel that the main cast are in any degree of danger, and that does neuter the film a little.
There's also a heavy use of drone filming present throughout the movie that's used to such a degree that it does feel like the filmmakers had a new toy and were desperate to use it. There's a sequence where police cars are arriving outside the bank, cops getting out the vehicles and taking up position, and the camera is flying from one car to the other, briefly zooming in on the cops, then flying off to the next vehicle. It's pretty disorienting, with the camera moving a little too fast and things looking just off enough that the main feeling in the scene was a sense of nausea. The already mentioned scene where Mason ahs to run to stop a hostage also uses some drone photography, with the camera flying around a large office space indoors that was incredibly jarring and disorienting in the moment too. Drones have opened up filmmaking in a lot of great ways, but their use here feels more like a gimmick than anything else.
Despite these flaws, the film proves to be entertaining enough for its relative short runtime, and there's nothing overtly wrong or egregiously bad to be found here. It's enjoyable, there are some cute moments with the cast, but there's nothing particularly exciting either. It's a decent film that I'm happy to watch the once, but not one that I'd be rushing back to watch again.
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