GONE WITH THE WIND
Rob Cohen whips up a storm for a high-stakes bank robbery like no other…
Sometimes, a title tells you everything about a film. The Hurricane Heist, in which audacious crims attempt to steal $600 million from the US treasury in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane, tops even Snakes On A Plane for self-explanatory nomenclature. “It seemed like a new way to do an action film,” director Rob Cohen tells Teasers. “Driving in rainstorm surges, 160-mile-an-hour winds, all sorts of craziness.”
Cohen was sent The Hurricane Heist in 2015, and bluntly admits “it wasn’t the best script, but it had a great idea”. Rewrites followed, but the core remained. Twenty-five years after witnessing a tropical cyclone kill his father, Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell) is now a meteorologist tracking Hurricane Tammy – the fiercest storm in US history – currently en route to his former home town, where Will’s brother Breeze (True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten) still resides as a mechanic.
Also in the mix is Casey Corbyn (Taken’s Maggie Grace), a US Treasury agent whose satellite facility is about to be robbed by Ralph Ineson’s inside man
Perkins. But with Tammy imminent, thievery takes a back seat to nature.
Funded independently to the tune of $35m, Cohen was intent on shooting entirely in-camera, using 100mph wind machines, thousands of gallons of water and rear-projected LED screens rather than greenscreen. Why? “Well, frankly, I’m sick of CGI,” Cohen laughs. “I was one of the guys who developed it when I did DragonHeart. It just gets to a place where you wish you could go, ‘Holy shit, that was real?’”
As the man who made vehicular mayhem fashionable again with The Fast And The Furious, Cohen isn’t turning his back on mechanical carnage either, staging a breakneck chase in the eye of a storm with a vehicle dubbed The Dominator. “I had fun designing it, we based it on small military tanks,” Cohen chuckles. “I wanted a storm chaser, but I wanted it to be like a prototype with wires hanging out, like you built it in your own garage, not a slick Tom Cruise vehicle. It really becomes a character in the movie.”
The film also takes a firm stance on the ecological impact of our actions on the planet, with Cohen – who previously worked with Al Gore – refusing to pull his punches. “I wrote the speech myself where Toby explains the connection between the oceans warming and the fuel for these storms. He says it’s man-made climate change, flat out. Right now the limit is a category 5, but there could be category 6s and 7s. I wanted it to be clear that it isn’t just some freaky storm, but that you could look forward to more of these, and bigger ones.” The sequel writes itself.
ETA | 6 APRIL / THE HURRICANE HEIST OPENS THIS SPRING.