Director – Mike Mendez, Screenplay – Guy Stevenson, Producers – Rick Benattar & Nigel Thomas, Photography – Jan-Michael Losada, Music – Alexander Bornstein, Makeup Effects – Caitlyn Brisbin, Production Design – Lauren Meyer. Production Company – Benattar-Thomas Productions.
Cast
Henry Rollins (Bernard), Torrance Coombs (Paul), Victoria Pratt (Detective Pascal), Michael Aaron Milligan (Danny), Mykel Shannon Jenkins (Washington), Nick Principe (Biggs), Mark Kelly (AJ), Ken Lyle (Rick), Kristina Klebe (Tracy), Camilla Jackson (Ally), John O’Brien (Mark), Zo Zosak (Harris), Ace Marrero (Santiago), John J. York (Sinclair), Robert Craighead (Franklin), Faye DeWitt (Mrs Waxman), Courtney Compton (Cynthia)
Plot
The State Private Vault Company, a safety deposit box leasing company in Los Angeles, has announced that it will be shutting down. On the company’s last days of operation, armed robbers burst in and take a handful of staff and customers who are present to collect their items hostage. The customers include Bernard, who is a wanted serial killer known as The Windows Killer, who has come to retrieve his collection of removed eyeballs from the locker he keeps them in. Things start to go wrong – one of the hostages sends a 911 text and the police arrive outside, while inside Bernard takes the opportunity to claim more victims.
Mike Mendez has been a rising name as a horror director since the late 1990s. Mendez first appeared as director of the horror film Killers (1996) and went onto other genre works such as Bimbo Movie Bash (1997), The Convent (2000), the documentary Masters of Horror (2002), The Gravedancers (2006), Big Ass Spider! (2013), Lavalantula (2015), Don’t Kill It (2016) and one of the episodes of Satanic Hispanics (2022), as well as producing Tales of Halloween (2015) and directing the Friday the 31st episode, plus producing Unnatural (2016), Against the Night (2017), Snake Outta Compton (2018) and The Shed (2019).
There have been a good many heist and bank robbery films from classics like Rififi (1955), Topkapi (1965), The Italian Job (1969), The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1976) to more modern efforts like Ocean’s 11 (2001) and sequels, Inside Man (2006) and Baby Driver (2017). Not long before watching The Last Heist, I had just finished watching all the way through tv’s immensely entertaining La Casa de Papel (US title: Money Heist) (2017-21), which is the ultimate bank robbery series and going to be a hard one for any successor to top in terms of its entertainingly over-the-top twists and turns.
Serial killer Henry Rollins with Kristina Klebe
It is hard to believe there is actually a genre niche of horror movies concerning bank vaults. Prior to this there had been From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999) about bank robbers encountering vampires and not long after this there was also The Vault (2017) about bank robbers finding ‘something’ inside a vault after they break in. More recently, there was Army of the Dead (2021) and Army of Thieves (2021) about a vault break-in during a zombie apocalypse. More mundanely than these others, The Last Heist features a team of armed robbers breaking into a safety deposit box company at the same time as a Serial Killer is already there and taking the opportunity to add to his kill count.
Against all of these, The Last Heist pales. Mike Mendez’s failing is simply that he has a weak script to deal with. Moreover, it is one where he as a director fails to puts the screws on the heist and compound the tension of the situation. There’s Henry Rollins’ killer eliminating people but that is it. There is no drawn out suspense as we watch the operation unfold, no unexpected twists and turns in the telling. It is one of the dullest playings out of heist dramatics that one has seen. The one plus that film has going for it is Henry Rollins who gets into the role of the murderous psycho with a great deal of relish.
