Shelter

Imagine every possible cinema cliché smashed together with amateur writing, gimmicky effects and bellow average directing.

From explosions that look like keyed out greenscreen motion graphics just thrown onto some footage to cringeworthy "hacking scenes" I spent more time laughing at this film than enjoying the story, it's a serious movie with a serious storyline but fails to give any backstory or further information on the characters involved, we almost just get thrown into heist scenes with no real motive for anything? I struggle to connect with the characters or what the greater mission is.

Watch this film for a quick cringeworthy laugh but it's a highschool experimental film level movie.

I think the writer's idea was well intentioned and it really could've been a great film, if only the execution was better 🙁

Bad people do deserve punishment, but hitting them directly won't cut it. Stealing from bad guys really relies on a series of assumptions and careful planning, but having a safety net is like having hidden pieces on the chessboard to prevent moles and set up moles. Seeing from the trailer that a group of people with various skills are getting together to plan an art heist, it's such an exciting and tense scenario that builds up anticipation. You're waiting to see each team member shine in their roles, but the actual content spends quite a bit of time setting up the legitimacy of the art heist, which takes away from the unexpected surprises. Comparing it to another incredible movie about outsmarting bad guys and stealing their stuff, "Now You See Me," it falls a bit short, to be honest.

The story is good and could have been an amazing film but there was no passion, no chemistry. It felt like watching a table read. Or a very long amateur Tik tok skit. If they do a sequel I hope they improve.

All of the actors can act. Except for the arrogant collector. If he is the one that directed and produced the film then it makes sense why it had good actors, a good story, but not painful to watch. Especially when there are two actors who work together on a very good tv show together. Two characters who have demonstrated that they have chemistry together.

Maybe it can be turned into a Netflix series.

You'd be better off watching the TV series Leverage. This is similar, but they take themselves way to seriously and it makes it a bit cringe worthy. The acting is also a tad worse in my opinion, because of this. It's cheesy without being funny.

Also for supposed expert thieves they aren't very good at what they do. The fight are pretty painful to watch. Not sure if this was a made for TV movie, but it feels like one.

All that said, if you like heist movies this is okay to watch if you're doing something else, like making dinner or playing a board game. It certainly doesn't need your full attention.

This has to be the worst directed, written and acted film I've seen in a long time. The over-stylized directing was trying to impress, but ended up being either cringeworthy or laughable, especially the outdated camera techniques and effects like the slow-mo scenes. This felt like a high school drama class production from the 90's, and I've seen more exciting and more realistic made-for-TV caper films from Lifetime and Aurora Teagarden Mysteries.

Then you have the overly cliched writing with matching characters and dialogue, that was parts from every other film in this genre, but this was done much worse. There was nothing unique or engaging besides the overall premise of the story, than ended up playing out like a cheap wannabe heist film. None of the characters were convincing, and much of that blame goes to the director for failing to direct his cast properly, and some blame falls on the writer who gave us the most annoying character played by Cam Gigandet. You will literally eye-roll and cringe at his character - demeanor, dialogue, etc, the entire runtime.

Even in its normally comfortable 91 min runtime, this entire film was dragged out with plot and technical issues in between every cliche available to this genre. It was just an unnecessary film written and directed so lazily, you'll cringe in all the moments that are supposed to be funny, and laugh at many serious scenes, like when the gold bar is being pawned and is being handled like a hollow piece of plastic. There is zero realism, suspense or thrills in this laughably failed caper.

It's a very generous 4/10 from me, because I can forgive certain rookie filmmaking mistakes. But there were far too many I couldn't overlook to recommend anyone waste their time seeing this like I did.