Review of Coin Heist (2017) by Julian E — 12 Oct 2017

Everybody was excited for this, right? So this is about a student at a Philadelphia prep school (Alex Saxon). When his teacher father gets arrested for embezzling, his school is essentially next to bankrupt.

He has to assemble a group of fellow students to do the impossible: rob the U.S. Mint to save the after school programs. Now for some reason that I am not abundantly certain of, this became a running joke of excitement between my wife and I when the trailers for this started popping up on Netflix.

I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised, as she was a Disney kid through and through growing up, and this was very much advertised like Disney movie. Not a theatrical Disney release, mind you.

A Disney Channel Original Movie. This is like The Avengers meets the very tired "save the rec center" plot. All of these kids have their own specific thing that they bring to the table, and they are going to have to learn to work together if they want to make this heist happen.

There's the incredibly smart kid that ends up being the gadgets expert, the small girl who is inexplicably great at hacking a la Jurassic Park, the charismatic girl with moxie and the scrappy leader with nothing to lose.

It ends up being both predictable and implausible, but you could probably guess that without me telling you. There is also not a lot of care in the science and logistics behind this (surprising, I know).

Even if you can get past the security of a government building being so subpar that high schoolers can thwart them without problem, you have to believe that they have the know-how to run extremely heavy machinery that likely requires way more than just four people to operate.

These are actors that don't look like high schoolers, and after having just so recently watched the show American Vandal that pulled off that feat excellently, it is something that really stood out for me.

Also, the lead guy isn't that great of an actor, and the supporting cast ends up outperforming him, albeit slightly. On a base level, there is something about heists that are always at least a little exciting, and that is marginally the case with this as well.

Still, Coin Heist wraps up overly neatly to be satisfying, and there's no real reason to watch this.