Stanley Tucci headlines Masterplan (now on Prime Video), a heist comedy in which he plays the mastermind of a masterplan to steal a masterwork. Co-starring Simona Tabasco (The White Lotus) and Victor Belmondo, the film seeks to tweak the genre formula in a couple of different ways — but whether that results in anything particularly notable is the question.
MASTERPLAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Chiara (Tabasco) operates in Rome, using high-tech whatchajiggers to facilitate her thievery. Jay (Belmondo) is in Paris, and his speciality is mini explosives that let him neatly slice open a safe and then boof a hole in the wall to escape. EXPERTS they are, in the art of burglarizationism. The plot summons them to Lake Como in Italy for a meet-cute of crooked minds that think alike, and their flirting quickly becomes awkward after they learn they’re half-siblings. Whoops! The parent they share is Roger (Tucci), who rigged this charade in order to reveal his parentage — and recruit them for his grand plan to snatch the Mona Lisa, no big deal.
Now, I can hear your thoughts in my mind’s ears: Is it a bit much of a coincidence that two siblings who never met are both masterly thieves? Yeah, our suspension of disbelief hangs by a fraying thread, but the script spews something about “DNA” then quickly distracts us with a sub-Guy Ritchie flash-forward in which Roger narrates The Plan in a thinks-it’s-clever sequence set to bouncy, uptempo music. You know, he’ll do this and then she’ll do that and then bompity-bompity-chakka-chakka-waaa!, they got the world’s most valuable painting in their mitts.
So, a subtitle: 7 DAYS TO GO. As they study the plan and their roles in it, Chiara and Jay quickly learn the art of sibling bickering while Roger reads The Single Dad’s Survival Guide. Chiara’s techawhatsises can do almost anything, because she’s a Movie Hacker. Jay can weasel out of any tough spot because he’s a Movie Sneaker-Arounder. And Roger is almost certainly more than meets the eyeball, because Stanley Tucci is so good at duplicitiousness. So yes, the twists start stacking up like cordwood, no surprise there. Because in movies like this it’s less about the existence of twists and more about when they’ll finally stop.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? More like Ocean’s Two-Star Review.
Performance Worth Watching: I’m sorry to say that Masterplan doesn’t have much going for it beyond Tucci’s usual fastidious, quick-witted persona.
Our Take: The sibling thing is the wrinkle Masterplan adds to all the usual components of the slick heist comedy, a decent-enough idea that the writing fails at every level. The screenplay takes an emotional throughline with creative potential and squanders it, the estranged-sibling/father stuff fully half-assed, an ill-considered and unconvincing veneer of sentimentality over all the usual plot machinery of sub-par master-thief movies that convince no one of their wit save for themselves. And they are so often pleased with how they dole out double- and triple- and sextuple-crosses, aren’t they?
So familiarity is a hurdle the film has to clear, and style is the Acme Rocket Shoes it can strap on to achieve that – note the brand, here deployed because I’m trying to tell you that the film ends up slamming face-first into a canyon wall. Masterplan director Thomas Vincent is content to coast on preestablished Ritchieisms and Ocean’s (Fill in the Number) maneuvers and never bothers to attempt even the slightest innovation. Technically, the movie is slapped-together, and tonally, it’s uninspired, its comic timing DOA, the cast unable to wring a meager laugh out of a bland screenplay that leads to a devolves into drivel. The story could conceivably go on forever as long as it keeps tacking on “clever” little twists, but lord help us, this movie already gives us enough for three movies. Three bad movies.
Our Call: I’m forgetting Masterplan existed even as I type this. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
