Luke Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a dealer at a casino who is unable to pay for his daughter’s medical bills. Desperate, he turns to the casino owner “The Pope” (Robert DeNiro) for a loan and is promptly turned down. Feeling he has no choice he turns to a colleague at the casino who has a plan to rob it. 

I stumbled across Heist late one night on Sky Cinema as a scene with DeNiro and Morgan was playing out. As a huge fan of DeNiro I was instantly intrigued and promptly downloaded it. Fully aware he has made a lot of films in order to finance his TriBeCa production company and festival I was expecting a B movie mess and I was moderately surprised. Yes, it is incredibly rough around the edges but there is quite a fun film underneath. Thanks in the main to a strong recognisable cast and a really overly complicated plot that is ultimately quite amusing if you go with it. 

DeNiro is “The Pope”! What a great name for an uncompromising casino owner. We know he is uncompromising thanks to a brutal opening scene that I think is purposely trying to remind you of DeNiro in Casino. Of course he is dying and wants to reconnect with his now grown daughter Sydney (Kate Bosworth). Our anti-hero Luke of course is trying to save his daughter. We won’t ever find out what from but keep in mind that parallel. Throw in the mad dog Jason Cox (Dave Bautista) as Luke’s fellow heist criminal, a getaway bus running out of fuel with a pregnant woman and a man dressed as a beaver as passengers and the possibilities are endless. And this is before we have good cop Kris (Gina Carano) and bad cop Marconi (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). 

Running at only 93 minutes there is a lot packed in and there are some large gaps in the plot logic. But heck, accept that this is a straight to dvd type of film and it’s a lot of fun. Jeffery Dean Morgan proves yet again he is a good actor who is often in bad films and DeNiro is not just phoning it in. Heck if you gave this to David Mamet, proven king of the heist, so much so he even wrote and directed a film called Heist in 2001 this could even be elevated to ‘A’ movie status.