This Australian crime thriller is almost wilfully lacking in originality, but that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining in a pulpy, hypnotically noisy way, like one of tacky but oddly compelling 70s or 80s genre pics you can’t quite switch off while channel-surfing. Epicene young hunk Brenton Thwaites plays a greenhorn kid who finds himself in a maximum-security prison for an unspecified offence. His chess smarts catch the eye of Ewan McGregor’s hardened yet ruggedly handsome armed robber, and just when it looks like some homoerotic jailhouse romance is going to blossom, the kid is busting McGregor out of jail with a helicopter and they’re planning a heist of pure gold bars from a mining facility. In order to reassure viewers of its heterosexual bona fides, the film drafts in Alicia Vikander (so great in Testament of Youth, so not good here) to be Thwaites’ tart-with-a-heart love interest. McGregor, who is having a bit of comeback moment right now, is kind of great as the ruthless antihero, and the action set pieces have plenty of fizz.
