Masterplan arrives on Amazon Prime Video this weekend with the studio apparently embarrassed by it — burying the release in favor of romantic drama Love of Your Life. That's not entirely unfair. Director Thomas Vincent, who did sharp work on episodes of Bodyguard, has made something that sits between competent genre execution and a film that doesn't trust its own premise enough to commit to anything. The setup is pleasantly pulpy: cybersecurity hacker Chiara (Simona Tabasco, buzzy off The White Lotus Season 2) and explosives expert Jay (Victor Belmondo, grandson of Jean-Paul) are Europe's top young criminals, connecting through a dark web job app and breaking into a Lake Geneva mansion when they first meet in person. The film threatens to become a crisp will-they-won't-they caper — and then Stanley Tucci shows up as Roger, a veteran British thief with a decades-long plan to steal the Mona Lisa, and reveals that Chiara and Jay are his illegitimate half-siblings, the byproduct of a busy mid-90s. The incest subplot is where Masterplan loses the plot it almost had. The film seems unbothered by the revelation, letting Chiara make jokes about her half-brother's 'hammer' and propose strip poker as a conflict-resolution mechanism. These gags don't land with dark irony — they land with a thud, as the review says, because the film hasn't earned the transgression and doesn't seem to know it needs to. Tucci, for his part, is game. His Roger sends up aristo archetypes with timing that suggests a better film nearby — one where the role had actual interiority rather than a string of one-liners. The best of them ('I'm English. Not bad is what I say when I orgasm') works once. The film returns to the well too often. Tabasco gets a platinum-blond diva moment the camera lingers on with appropriate relish; Belmondo loses his shirt with similar regularity. The film's eye for both the female and gay male gaze is one of its more consistent pleasures. The heist mechanics themselves — drones, retina scan cloning, VR intrusion, truffle-related espionage, a conveniently forgotten tunnel under the Louvre — are deployed with enough momentum that the film's nearly two-hour runtime doesn't collapse. There's one legitimately clever helium balloon gag that shows what a sharper script could have done with this material. The third act accumulates twists past the point of diminishing returns, running about 30 minutes longer than the story earns. Vincent rates as a hair better here than his previous Amazon effort, Role Play, which is damning with faint praise. The Ocean's Eleven franchise this is not — the characters are too thinly written for you to root for anyone with conviction — but Masterplan earns its status as adequate Sunday evening company. The problem is that adequate is genuinely the ceiling, not a floor that better attention might raise.
