It’s late at night in Alabama and a public bus has been hijacked by a bunch of robbers. Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), our protagonist and one of the robbers, connects with a lady police officer Kris (Gina Carano) to bargain against the safety of the passengers. She refuses to budge: “I’m the cop. You are the thief. Its pretty black and white,” she tells him. To which Vaughn responds, “Oh, come on! No grey area? There’s always a grey area,” with a casual self-awareness, almost as if he is referring to stock ‘grey’ characters in the movies.
I’m probably reading too much into the scene because Bus 657 (curiously called this in India but had released the world over with an even more uninteresting title ‘Heist’) has no place for such cheekiness. Or subtlety. Everything is spelled out and neatly explained. If Vaughn’s treatment money-for-daughter’s cancer sob story is not enough to suggest that he is a good man getting his hands dirty for something noble, we are given blatantly expository lines such as the abovementioned ones. Our man, here, is so grey, that he even sports a salt-n-pepper beard, has grey hair and wears greyish clothes through the film. He manipulates his partners in crime (one of them played by Dave Bautista, who I saw for the first time since I saw him wrestling in WWE) so that the passengers, that include a pregnant lady and a kid, are not harmed. But Vaughn and gang isn’t just running from cops. They are also being chased by the casino honcho – the Pope’s men. The robbers work in the Pope’s illegal casino, one which they have just burgled.
Enter Robert de Niro as Pope, who, we are told, is a cruel man of principles who loves money more than anything else and “never makes exceptions”. De Niro sleepwalks through the role like he has in a lot of bad movies in the last leg of his career. There is a desperate attempt to construct parallels between Pope and Vaughn – both tortured by daughter issues – that culminate into a lazy climax with a ‘twist’ that we see coming a mile away.
More twists are thrown at us as we approach the climax. One of them involving a mole cop doesn’t have a logical progression. Why would Vaughn not inform Kris, the lady cop with a good heart, about her colleague who actually works for Pope? Even Kris is a poorly written character who plays a milder, feminine version of Abhishek Bachchan in Dhoom whose only job is to glorify the thief in the audience’s eyes.
The film, thankfully, isn’t too long. To be fair, it might even work for an audience okay with spending 1 hour 30 minutes of their life watching a ‘timepass’ level generic thriller. But for the more serious moviegoer, Bus 657 is one they should be happy to miss.
