This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Helluva Storm
Plot Overview
1992, Gulfport, Alabama. Hurricane Andrew hits with a vengeance. Old man Rutledge swerves his pickup off the road to miss some debris and gets stuck. He hustles his two young boys, Will & Will's older bro Breeze, inside a deserted farmhouse for safety (“Gotta get you inside”) to wait while he tries to winch out the truck. A hurricane cloud coalesces into the shape of a skull portending disaster.
Gulf coast, present day. Tropical storm Tammy has been upgraded to a category 1—the mildest kind—hurricane as it wends its way to a broad landfall that will encompass Alabama to Florida. In Gulfport Sheriff Dixon (Ben Cross) dampens the celebratory mood from their recently concluded fall festival by declaring a “mandatory evacuation.”
Irish-American truck driver Connor on a “milk run” lets his partner fellow ATF Officer Casey Corban (Maggie Grace) take the wheel to navigate around a traffic jam (“We have to bank this load before the storm hits.”) They're on their way to a Dept. of Treasury secure facility. Meanwhile Dr. Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell), a meteorologist, is out in the field taking weather readings from his federal-issue storm-proof vehicle—“the Dominator”—when his weather nose tells him, “They're underestimating you.” On a whim he whips his car around to visit his brother Breeze in his mechanic's shop in New Hope, whom he hasn't seen in five years.
At the facility a nervous Agent Corban resets the vault code. Then the lights go out (“System Failed.”) She has to drive into town to find a mechanic to repair the backup generator. While she's gone some organized bad guys perform a coordinated breach of the facility only to find themselves without power and sans the current vault code. One of the men states the obvious, “This is not good.”
Ideology
The title The Hurricane Heist consists of two main words either of which would grab one's attention seen in a newspaper headline, but they're seldom if ever seen together. Hurricane Andrew would make more interesting copy were it to have a feminine name Andie as the weather bureau used to name them before the feminists complained—now they're alternated with masculine names. Here Andie even rhymes with Tammy the current hurricane. In honor of National Women's Month when this movie was released, let's see if we can't get a woman's name a better deal. Adapting a piece by Fowler on Saxonism to [anti-]sexism, we'd read:
The truth is perhaps that conscious deliberate [anti-]S_x__ism is folly, that the choice or rejection of particular words should depend not on their [gender- inclusiveness] but on considerations of expressiveness, intelligibility, brevity, euphony, or ease of handling,
Fowler takes the approach of balancing one's language as a whole, not piecemeal as the feminists have done. Hurricane Tammy is not a bad hurricane in this movie, just excessively large. People have been evacuated, windows boarded up, and with all the money in the economy, we presume insurance paid. The scientists peg the benefit of hurricanes as a natural heat exchange from a warming ocean to a cooler atmosphere. Andrew with its death-head face was bad for the people caught in it, but those kids had no mother to tend them, and it was too much for Mr. Rutledge alone. We need more nurturing women in hurricanes. If we call them Hurricanes Andie and Tammy, we've achieved that goal to, (Jer. 6:16) “ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.” Then we just say Tammy was “Bunyanesque”, and we've included a masculine image to re-balance genders.
Now that we've got interesting verbiage, let's continue the run. We've got English expressions associated with delivery work, i.e., “milk run” and “bank this load.” An interesting ethnic name: “Irish.” Computer terminology: “uplinked.” All kinds of cop or military lingo: “copy.” Meteorological terms: “pressure inversion.” In a dark storm we see them use ASL for “Kill the lights.” There are descriptions of weapons (“Browning.”) Car talk. Lots of football talk (“Go long.”) Kids bickering, adults cracking jokes, and criminals making their plans. We even get a quote from American literature, Mark Twain (“Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake”—Life on the Mississippi.)
We may now look at Marsh to go the next step: (448)the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general English tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean?
The point of this movie, from a theological point of view, seems to be the temptation that riches exert on people when there's opportunity, and nobody will get hurt (theoretically), and nobody is going to miss it—the money's old. In the good old King James Version, which isn't going to be improved on, the proverb to consider is, (Prov. 23:4-5) “Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.”
Production Values
This stormy movie, “” was directed by Rob Cohen. It was written by Carlos Davis, Jeff Dixon, Anthony Fingleton, and Scott Windhauser. It stars Toby Kebbell, Maggie Grace, Ryan Kwanten, and Ralph Ineson. Nobody's going to win any acting awards here. The script wasn't all that great, so what could they have done? Besides which, they were often in competition with Nature's wind to project their lines.
MPAA rated it PG–13 for sequences of gun violence, action, destruction, language and some suggestive material. It was filmed in the unlikely location of Bulgaria. The CGI was pretty good considering the low budget. The action was okay, but the whole film being dark one couldn't always make out what was happening. The southern accents aren't going to fool anybody. The wind didn't necessarily blow consistently everywhere in a scene. Good stunt work, though. A few plot twists to keep us on our toes. The villains were more opportunists than delicious rogues.
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
If you expect too much from this movie, you might be disappointed. I like all kinds of movies, so I thought it was great for being cliché ridden and rich in job-specific dialogue. It was an audio gas but a visual dud.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed. Suitability for Children: Suitable for children 13+ years with guidance. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Video Occasion: Better than watching TV. Special effects: Average special effects. Overall product rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, print.
Fowler, H.W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. USA. Oxford UP. 1946. Print.
Marsh, George P. “Formation of
our English sacred dialect.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to read
or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
bibles.n7nz.org