The American writer-director Dan Bush enjoyed cult
success ten years ago with The Signal,
a clever media studies-age fable about a mysterious transmission that converted
suggestible viewers into bloodthirsty killers. It’s just possible he hit upon
the idea for his latest while standing in line with that movie’s residual
cheques. Why not do a film set entirely in a bank, perennial locus of low-level
tension? The result: The Vault (**,
15, 91 mins), a hokey horror-thriller in which tough-talking robbers the Dillon
sisters (Taryn Manning and Francesca Eastwood) storm Centurion Trust’s downtown
branch, only to set off more than alarm bells.
That this isn’t another Dog Day Afternoon can be gleaned from the clanging hints dropped
early on. One employee lets slip the old building spooks wider-eyed colleagues;
twitchy assistant manager James Franco seems unlikely to reassure anybody
falling behind on their repayments. Bush, clearly, intends to tease us. Franco
redirects the gang to the basement vault, thereby cueing fully ten minutes of
sweaty Dillon drilling, and even when the reinforced door finally creaks open,
an unhelpful power surge plunges everybody into darkness.
In short, as much here tries the patience as frays
the nerves. It’s a shame Bush resists the full-on monster movie we anticipate,
because the path he does follow carries The
Vault into that netherworld between the horror and thriller genres. Neither
scary or nasty enough for one, nor smart enough for the other, the whole
assumes the look of an idle thought that has no pay-off: the final half-hour
proves anticlimactic, with Bush shamelessly splicing one late reveal together
from two prominent Nineties hits.
The ragtag players, at least, approximate the mixed
crowd trying not to look too overdrawn or otherwise suspicious in the lobby of
your high-street HSBC. Franco, thankfully, looks to have reverted to acting
from annoying the planet, and this does feel like a breakthrough of sorts for
the fierce-ferocious Eastwood, previously best known as a model, reality star
and daughter of Clint. Her resemblance to her mother, the actress Frances
Fisher, is properly spooky; the yarn rattling away around her like loose change
is, regrettably, altogether less haunting.
The Vault opens in selected cinemas today, ahead of its DVD release on October 9.
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