Film review: A Quiet Place ***, The Hurricane Heist **. (2024)

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By Preston Wilder

If you can't say something nice, goes the phrase, don'tsay anything at all. Or, in movie terms: if your dialogue is liable tobe cheesy and embarrassing, better to have no dialogue at all -- or atleast, as little as possible.

That's the guiding principle in A Quiet Place , with a plotthat might've been reverse-engineered to fit this particulargimmick. John Krasinski (who also directed) and Emily Blunt are theparents of a young rural family in a dystopian near-future overrun bymonsters. The monsters, great spindly insect-like creatures, arelightning-fast but also blind, responding only to sound -- so the way toavoid them is to stay very, very quiet. No talking (except in signlanguage), no crying, no loud toys or beeping electronics. If you mustplay Monopoly, make sure you roll the dice on the carpet. "Bigsounds" are forbidden in this world -- a fitting stricture in afilm that makes a virtue of its smallness, running a trim 90 minutes inone main location.

Not that A Quiet Place is low on incident or excitement; it'snot even quiet, with a rather emphatic music score (a scene where thecouple slow-dance to Neil Young -- flooding the film with sudden music-- would've been more effective had it shattered half an hour oftotal silence; but you can't do that in a multiplex movie). As ifto make up for the absence of dialogue, Krasinski goes for all-outjump-scares,

gory collateral damage, plus additional perils involving a floodedhouse and a grain silo where one of the kids almost suffocates.It's unclear how the family have a silo full of grain after 472days of enforced isolation, but let's not get snippy with such asmart little movie.

There is one conspicuously smart element. We know something thecharacters don't -- something pretty major, viz. a way to destroythe monsters once and for all -- and it makes for constant tension inthe second half, when the house is surrounded and the stakes raisedconsiderably. Otherwise the thrills are a mixed bag, seeming rathercontrived and relentless. The details of life without sound are amusing(viewers looking for a quirkier take on a similar gimmick are directedto Guy Maddin's outlandish Careful , from 1992), especially whenthe teenage daughter clearly longs to launch into a whiny tantrum butcan only pout and look daggers at her mum -- but the action gets a bitfrenetic, the suspense piled on with a trowel. At one point, Mum (who isboth barefoot and very pregnant) steps on an exposed nail as she'scoming down the stairs (ouch!), hobbling around with her foot oozingblood -- and meanwhile there's a monster in the house, and did wealso mention that her waters have broken? Sometimes it's all youcan do to keep quiet.

The four guys who wrote the script for The Hurricane Heist wouldalso have done well to keep quiet -- or at least make their charactersdeaf-mutes, so the film could've kept its action mayhem andimpressively extreme weather without the facepalm-inducing dialogue."You can't change people," sighs older brother Breeze(Ryan Kwanten), resisting younger bro Will (Toby Kebbell)'s pleasto get out of Dodge before the hurricane hits. "Well, I'mtellin' you, this hurricane can change people -- from alive todead!" babbles Will hilariously. "So we gotta go!"

Will is a first-rate meteorologist (we know this because hisfriends tell him so: "You're a first-ratemeteorologist"), but no-one listens when he claims the Storm of theCentury is coming -- maybe because they're all too busy with thetitular heist, taking advantage of the bad weather to rob the local USTreasury facility. 'They' include a craggy Irishman, asmall-town sheriff, and a hacker calling herself Sasha Van Dietrich; wealso have Casey (Maggie Grace), an FBI agent who was never the same"after Utah" -- a misstep that got her partner killed, thoughmaybe the hurricane can provide her redemption. "I made a badcall," she admits, wincing at the memory.

Bad calls -- albeit sometimes blissfully bad -- proliferate in TheHurricane Heist , very much including the dialogue; I tried noting downevery ludicrous exchange, but it's hard to keep up. ("Hundredsof millions and a hurricane aren't the best co*cktail on themenu," grunts a middle-aged Treasury guy; "You know all aboutco*cktails, don't you Moreno?" pipes up Casey light-heartedly.)The action, however, is solid, the wanton destruction enjoyable --needless to say, the storm vacuums up houses and cars like no storm inhistory -- and the extended finale acts as a reminder that director RobCohen also made the original Fast and the Furious . The image of threegiant trucks roaring down the highway, with Will and Breeze leaping fromone to another and the hurricane (in the form of an apocalyptic blackcloud) closing in behind them, is likely to stay with me long after therest of this silly movie has faded -- rather like the image of a newbornbeing fitted with an oxygen mask and entombed in a box (to stifle hiscrying) in A Quiet Place . Who needs words, when you have visuals?