Movie of the Week - Coin Heist

Alexa: I’m not sure if teen movies were actually better when I was their target audience or if I just look back on them through rose-tinted glasses out of nostalgic fondness. But when I watched Coin Heist, all I could think was, “Back in my day kids in these movies stole the SAT scores and it made way more sense.” (But seriously, the teen heist movie of my youth starred the future Captain America and Black Widow, so it wins by default.) Coin Heist follows four high school students who fit neatly in Breakfast Club-style silos – the movie’s synopsis calls them the hacker, the slacker, the athlete and the perfect student – whose prep school is on the brink of closing after the headmaster allegedly embezzles money from the school’s endowment. So the unlikely friends concoct a plan to break into the U.S. Mint, print a batch of rare coins, smuggle them out and sell them to coin collectors in a bid to earn the money back. With a premise that outlandish, the movie has to have some sense of self-awareness to succeed. But instead of embracing the story’s inherent silliness, Coin Heist takes itself too seriously. And unlike the Breakfast Club characters it tries to emulate, the movie’s protagonists feel about as cold and flat as the money they steal. Unfortunately the movie dedicates more time to their interpersonal drama than to the heist itself, and what could have been a wild, entertaining ride falls flat as a result.

Joel: Alexa dances around it, but I’ll come right out and say it, The Perfect Score is the movie you should be watching instead of this one. I’m not sure that defending The Perfect Score as a truly great piece of filmmaking is the hill I want to die on, but it was impossible to watch Coin Heist without constantly comparing it to the earlier teen heist film, and Coin Heist fell short in pretty much every way. Like The Perfect Score, Coin Heist set itself up as The Breakfast Club meets Ocean’s Eleven, but then decided to add an indy, coming coming of age, teen melodrama feel to the whole thing. The feel of the movie doesn’t mesh well with the premise at all and the whole thing comes off as a little tone deaf. For a heist movie, the actual heist sequence feels almost frustratingly muted in emotion or stakes. It feels like very little planning went into the layout of this sequence. There are shots of security guards walking around, but the layout of the building is never established so there’s no way of knowing if the kids are in any real danger or not. And if they are in danger, it seems to go away by simply ducking behind the coin machine for a few minutes. The whole thing feels very low stakes, which is not what you want out of a heist movie.

Chris: This movie isn't good and it's not necessarily bad but what it can certainly be identifying as is forgettable. One of the biggest rules filmmakers try to follow is that "it's better to show the audience than tell the audience" and that's exactly what this movie is guilty of breaking from the very onset of the premise. The smart girl approaches the headmaster's son about the heist idea because she saw how he was being treated by other students, evidence of which hadn't been really seen on the screen. And it felt like she jumped to the idea of this heist almost immediately and so the desperation behind the need to pull a plan like this off seems completely absent. What should feel like a last-ditch effort to save the school really comes off as the first idea one of them had and they treat it as if they had nothing better to do so why not? It's like the only direction any of the main characters were given were to be angsty teenagers but forget to tell to them to act like there were actual stakes and risks for stealing from the freaking US government. It takes a lot of work to make a movie which surprises me that this movie was even made because it came off that nobody could be bother to give a crap. I think I just talked myself out of my original premise in my first sentence, this movie is hot garbage, go make a angsty teenage movie where nobody does anything and maybe then the tone will fit the plot. And some of you reading this might be thinking, "wow, Chris, you really went from zero to sixty pretty quick on this movie." And you're right, I pulled something off nobody else in this dumb movie was capable of.

Next week's movie: Sing Street