9. The Vault (2017) Movie Review: A Mash'em Up Horror Crime Movie That Banks on Your Attention Shifting

Taking old things and spinning them into new gold is pretty much what people have been doing for millions of years. Fire guy in the cave guy just played on what fire in the field guy was working with. Wheel guy leaped forward the tech of dragging stuff. Citizen Kane dared to ask the question: can we make film students more pretentious? Then there's movies like The Vault trying to bank on movies like From Dusk Til Dawn.

    It's bank robbing time. With only two recognizable cast members in James Franco and Clifton Collins, Jr (as well as that woman from that show Drive Nathan Fillion was in. You know her), the vault has believe that you will care if our bank robbers make it out alive. Because watch out, y'all, this bank got murder ghosts. Then the assholes get murdered and the hot girls live. Because horror movie.

    The mixing genre is not new, like I said. This movie wants to be From Dusk Til Dawn but has no one charismatic enough like George Clooney or good enough effects to pay off the B-movie premise. What we are left with is an unlikeable cast with shifting alliances that systematically get killed like every other horror/slasher movie.

    As a bank heist movie, it does work though. As an Elmore Leonard fan, I enjoy unlikeable assholes pulling off a crime and doing weird shit. As a horror movie, it also works in the same way House on Haunted Hill (1999) did in that I wanted everyone to die and the monster ghost thing to kill them. Mashed together, though, and the ideas fall apart because I'm not invested in either scenario enough.

    Also, I fell asleep and missed ten minutes in the middle and caught right back up. In a movie banked on twists, that's a bad sign. Also a bad sign, the ending cliche that's a mess of, "Oh, he was a ghost the whole time? So what?" being beaten out by me realizing while reading the credits just now that the lead was Clint Eastwood's daughter.