★½
“Robbed of two hours of my life.”
I’ve seen worse films, to be quite clear. Technically, this is perfectly acceptable, with an apparently reasonable budget, put to decent use. But I don’t think I’ve seen one which has been more annoying. It manages to hit that sweep spot of being both incredibly stupid, while also congratulating itself for being very smart in its attempts at social commentary. But the annoyance extends beyond that, to purely instinctive reactions like really bad hairstyles sported by some players. I can’t explain these responses, and am not interested in analyzing or defending them. But they certainly played their part in my steadily increasing irritation at the plot, characters and execution, over an excessively long running-time of one hundred and sixteen minutes.
The heroine is Robbin (Serayah) – and, yes, there are two b’s there. She is a former bank employee, who was falsely accused of stealing two million dollars. With the evidence stacked against her, she took a plea agreement rather than risk a long jail sentence. When she gets out, she decides the best way to respond is… by actually stealing from the bank. Yeah. Let that morality and wisdom sink in. She assembles her old crew from the South Central ‘hood where she grew up, and they begin planning their heist. But one theft is deemed insufficient payback, and another, even bigger robbery is planned. This is despite the increasing attentions of the police, including a detective (Lee), who has known Robbin and her friends since they were kids.
Far and away the worst thing here is the script, also by Stokes. It demonstrates a repeated, startling level of ignorance about how banks work, how computers work [authority check: I spent over a decade in IT with HSBC], and how the police work. For example, in the world of this movie, a detective under announced and active investigation by Internal Affairs for corruption, is not only allowed to keep working on the case concerned, she then gets to lead a raid on the suspects’ base of operations. #NotHowCopsOperate Hell, you could possibly also throw how criminals work onto this heaping pile of no-knowledge, since at one point a robber clearly asks a bank cashier for “No unmarked bills.” Um… shouldn’t that be “No marked bills”?
Then there’s the whole clunky parallels to Robin Hood, beginning with the heroine’s first name. All her team – fresh off robbing a convenience store, I note – suddenly acquire altruistic reasons for their move into big-ticket crime. Add on a nasty racial strand, where just about everyone black is good, and everyone white is malicious and evil, to an almost tiresome degree, and you will perhaps begin to see from where my irritation stems. “Tubi Originals” are well-known for setting a low bar, to put it kindly. This falls short of reaching that bar. If it weren’t for the fact that Tubi is a free service, I would seriously be contemplating cancelling my subscription.
Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Serayah, Erica Pinkett, Jadah Blue, Robinne Lee