The Hurricane Heist [2018]

April 1, 2025

I vividly remember playing this movie when it came out and turning it off after twenty minutes. It just seemed too commercial, preposterous, and just plain old cheesy. However, sometimes that’s just what you want to watch. Especially if the production values along with the special effects are good, as they are here. Make no mistake, this is not some cheap rip-off movie from Asylum like Sharknado. They actually did an okay job when it comes to the sets and CGI. After all, the budget was a hefty sum of around $40 million. And if you like both the heist movies and hurricane movies, you would think you’re in for a treat but more about that later.

The Hurricane Heist is a dumb but entertaining action movie worth exactly one viewing. I don’t think I need to tell you much about the plot, it’s right there, in the title. There will be a hurricane and there will be a heist. And both of them will be happening at the same time. I’m guessing they started from this concept and, to tell you the truth, they haven’t gotten far. Instead of trying to make this feel at least somewhat plausible, they leaned into the craziness. They leaned into the craziness hoping it would cover up all the sloppy work. I instantly thought of one of my favorite heist movies of the nineties, Hard Rain. Now, that’s how you take the whole crazy heist thing to another level.

Add to this a painfully predictable story, one-dimensional characters, and over-the-top action and you got yourself a scaled-down version of one of those pop-corn disaster movies from the nineties. Of course, the first one that comes to mind is Twister. During the past ten years, we had numerous attempts to recreate the success of that little gem including its quite weak remake. Geostorm and Into The Storm are the two best examples. San Andreas, starring The Rock poured a lot more money into the production while Crawl added crocs to the mix. So, if you’re looking for something with the same vibe, do check these ones out.

The Hurricane Heist stars Maggie Grace (Taken) as the tough FRT agent Casey Corbyn and Toby Kebbell (Warcraft) as the soft meteorologist Will Rutledge. The supporting cast was much better featuring the likes of Ralph Ineson, Ryan Kwanten, and Ben Cross. All of them did an okay job considering what kind of movie this is. Ralph was as intense as ever while charming Ryan posed the question why aren’t we seeing him in bigger productions? Speaking of which, the director of this movie is none other than Rob Cohen, the guy who created the Fast and Furious franchise. And the oftentimes forgotten and highly entertaining XXX also starring Vin Diesel.

This means we will get a couple of really good chases featuring impressive stunts. Stunts I’m still not sure how they did. However, what was sorely missing was something alluded to in the title: hurricanes. We did get a wall of death thing like in the Mad Max: Fury Road but we never got to see those juicy twirly things wreak havoc. I guess this movie’s biggest flaw is, no matter how odd it sounds, that it’s not crazy enough. The reality was sucked out of the window a long time ago so why not just go balls-all-out on this one? It seems that that $40 million investment came with a few strings attached. And one of the main ones was to play things as safe as possible.

Which is too bad because this could’ve been one of those guilty pleasures we can keep returning to. At least we’ll get a couple of cool vehicles and action scenes. I especially liked Will’s hurricane-chasing armored car. I also want to clarify something. The Hurricane Heist is not a movie so bad that it’s good, just check out some of that titles in this category to see what I mean.