The Vault
Director: Jaume Balagueró
Year Released: 2021
Rating: 1.5
"Professional salvager" Walter (Liam Cunningham) and his crew find treasure deep underwater that gets immediately seized and claimed by the Spanish government, but Walter doesn't take no for an answer and recruits Cambridge-educated engineer Thom (Freddie Highmore) to concoct a way to steal the items from the heavily-guarded Bank of Spain. While it's hard to resist a solid crime caper - the movie self-consciously mentions Ocean's 11 early on - it's wading in very familiar territory with no new surprises: it never bothers explaining what's going on in detail and just rushes through the swindle as if particulars weren't important ... and all this leads up to the "vault" itself, which is (impractically) designed to flood itself. As far as action-based time-wasters are concerned, you could do worse - the production is slick at times - but I notice that of the original budget of €15 million, they only made a little over €1 million of that back ... what a swindle.