In the heist comedy, he plays plummy-voiced, legendary English thief Roger, who sets his sights on the Mona Lisa, and recruits a French explosives expert, Jay (Victor Belmondo), and an Italian cybercrime expert, Chiara (Simona Tabasco), to help him pull it off. They just happen to be his estranged children, who aren't aware of each other's existence, and this dysfunctional family must navigate old trauma and new friction to pull off their grand heist. Hijinks, inevitably, ensue.
Getting right to it, Masterplan feels like a glossy but hollow project that definitely cost a fair amount of money, but which will be swallowed up entirely by the annals of history when it comes time to look back at 2026. It's one of Tucci's least memorable turns, as much as it's clear he's having fun, even if you end up wishing someone had encouraged a little more... focus. It's mercifully under two hours, but at 110 minutes, it still feels about 20 minutes too long.
Masterplan Is A Smug, Unfunny "Comedy"
Despite being billed as a heist comedy, Masterplan is impressively unfunny. In fact, you actively have to hunt for where the jokes are supposed to be: There's some attempt at capturing the energy of a European farce, with a fast pace, "witty" banter between characters, and increasingly absurd twists. But the script is terrible, with prime lines like Roger replying to his children calling his plan to gain security access to the Louvre "not bad," with "Darling, I'm English, 'not bad' is what I say when I orgasm" and later when he likens something to being as safe as "drying your pubic hair over an active volcano." Someone clearly found this funny. You will not. I certainly did not.
The real problem is that Masterplan is a very consciously post-Ocean's Eleven caper, with the same stylish editing flourishes (to the point where individual shot choices feel like they were lifted wholesale from that franchise), character jousting, and complex heist mechanics. But the Ocean's movies were clever enough to nail everything in the details, and to treat their increasingly silly contrivances with seriousness. Masterplan, on the other hand, relies on absolutely everyone the trio encounters having single-digit IQs, and the audience either being baffled by insufferable techno-babble, or distracted by hollow editing quirks. If you drank every time there was a swipe edit, you'd be unconscious long before the end credits.
Once you start to notice the sloppiness in the details – simple things like the establishing scene showing the Mona Lisa exhibit being recognizably wrong for anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the Louvre – the distraction fails. All that's left is the awful script, worse story, and let's say difficult chemistry between the three leads. It also all smells of misspent money.
Masterplan Takes Twists To A Ridiculous Extreme
I don't want this to turn into a hit piece, and it's always nice to look for some positives, but I struggled with Masterplan from the outset. It starts with a contrivance that there are just seven days to prepare for the heist, so every moment counts. You'd think this would be a setup for some sort of dramatic pressure, but the movie hurtles through most of that time, and we see only surface-level details of the plan, so neither of the "experts" come across as such, and the stakes feel empty.
Things do get better when the third act twist – which is not entirely unsurprising, admittedly – is revealed, because some of the most frustrating creative choices are somewhat recontextualized. But for this type of precise narrative deception to work, everything up to that point has to be immaculate: The heist has to be on the audience, not just on the Louvre. It roughly works, but again, it dies in the details and thanks to the script.
After that third-act twist picks things up a little, Masterplan's ending fittingly descends into utter nonsense...
When things go wrong in Ocean's Eleven, it's because of unpredictable, exceptional twists; when they go wrong in Masterplan, it's because literally nothing was planned properly. The heist itself (which takes up a lot of runtime) is idiotic, but framed in a self-congratulatory, "look how clever we are" way that feels like provocation. I keep mentioning Ocean's Eleven, but it's because this is all just a rough approximation of it, to the extent that it feels like director Thomas Vincent was skim-reading from a Cliff's Notes.
There are other problems too – like the half-interested introduction of a villain after a while, who is utterly unmemorable – but my biggest issue as I watched Masterplan was that the initial gag of Chiara and Jay flirting before they know they're siblings continues well after the revelation. Did nobody check this script for ick? Line delivery is a problem throughout, especially because the younger leads spent the whole time quipping flirtatiously at each other, and Tucci's whole shtick seems to be stuck-up Englishman who occasionally shouts colorful curse words explosively. Again, that is the entire extent of the "comedy."
After that third-act twist picks things up a little, Masterplan's ending fittingly descends into utter nonsense, with more farcical twists added in place of actual narrative substance and a complete lack of logical build. Even the attempt at an emotional payoff rings hollow. I don't know what more to say, really, it's just a mess.
Masterplan is streaming on Prime Video worldwide now.
Release Date
October 16, 2026
Runtime
107 Minutes
Director
Thomas Vincent
Writers
David Wolstencroft, Thomas Vincent, Alessandro Fabbri, Alberto Vignati, Giacomo Durzi
English (US) ·