‘Heist 88’ Review: Courtney B. Vance Rounds Up a Crew for an Extremely Unimpressive Bank Robbery
variety.comJ. Kim Murphy Bank robbers tend to be fairly easy to root for in movies. After all, it’s not the audience’s money getting pocketed onscreen.
They typically don’t want to kill anybody, and their schemes tend to be pretty spectacular. “Heist 88,” a new Showtime release inspired by a real-life Chicago robbery from the year 1988, doesn’t trust viewers to be so accepting, so it spends most of its time underlining the generic reasons that its aggrieved crack team have for taking on the job.
It’s a crime film that finds little joy in criminality, crammed with characters who’ve been backed into a corner, hindered by an overarching morality that doesn’t match the material.
Courtney B. Vance leads the feature as Jeremy Horne, an over-the-hill thief about to head back to prison. At a celebration of life for his brother, remembered as a Black community leader, Horne has a run-in with his impressionable nephew Marshall (Bentley Green).
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