BEFORE: I'm trying to make the most of my time during what I hope will be the last few weeks of the coronavirus lockdown in New York - I'm working three days a week, but before that goes back up to five days, maybe it's a good time to take care of a few personal matters. I've got some medical issues that I started working on last year, like my hearing loss, and progress got curtailed when my insurance wouldn't cover the expensive hearing aid from Norway that one doctor was pimping, plus I got freaked out when a different doctor told me that my hearing loss was probably due to a small bone in my ear falling out of place, and the operation that could fix it had a 2% failure rate - meaning I could lose ALL my hearing in that ear. I was supposed to schedule a CAT scan but I didn't like my odds so I was going to go back and inquire about cheaper hearing aids, only by then the ear doctor I was seeing changed affiliations, and was no longer taking my insurance plan. I'm going to try Mt. Sinai in Union Square, which I know will take my insurance, and see if I can get this ball rolling again - if they would ever pick up the phone, that is. Maybe they're morning people, and I'm just calling too late.
Then I'd like to go visit my parents, even if that means a four-hour Amtrak ride up to Boston, I'm willing to wear a mask and stay away from other passengers, that's usually my train plan anyway (umm, the second part, that is, so really, it's just adding the mask). Maybe the weekend after Father's Day I can sneak up there for a weekend (three days is too much parents) and come back for work on that Monday morning.
We've also hired a construction guy to build us a new upstairs bathroom, something we've had on the back-burner agenda since we bought the house in 2004. The tile's always been loose, but lately water leaked into the kitchen after I took a shower - so we might as well tear the room apart, since everything in it, the sink, the toilet, the wallpaper, it's all horrible and outdated. That means someone has to be at home for three or four days while the construction is going on - why not the guy who's only working part-time? Sounds like a plan. But we just found out that the tile my wife chose will take a week or so to be in stock, so I guess I should just focus on those other things in the meantime. It's kind of like my movie chain, there's more than one way to get to a result, if the plan's not going to work, then just move things around on the schedule until it does.
Ethan Suplee carries over from "Motherless Brooklyn". And Nicolas Cage is here for a few days, his last film in this chain will start the final push toward Father's Day, from there it will just be a hop, skip and a jump to July 4.
THE PLOT: A pair of cops investigating a drug invasion stumble upon a mysterious vault.
AFTER: Oh, you just KNOW that somebody desperately wanted to title this film "The Vault", but then found out there was another film with James Franco in it that was also in development, so to avoid confusion in the marketplace, one of the production companies had to blink. Right? It's a shame, regardless of how good or bad this film turns out to be for you, but it really should have been "The Vault". "The Trust" is a bit of an OK pun, because some banks are called trusts, and there end up being trust issues between these two cops trying to break into the vault, but that still seems like a bit of a stretch. The "Bad cops make the best criminals" tagline almost makes up for it, but with all the bad cops in the news right now, super terrible timing. Not anybody's fault, but still, bad timing.
What's weird is the spin they put here on the older/mentor cop paired with the younger trainee cop. He simultaneously comes off as a very knowledgable, thorough straight arrow AND also someone who's not afraid to break the rules to get ahead. HUH? How can he be both of those things? That would be like a cop character who's not afraid to use a chokehold to subdue somebody AND at the same time a cop who's respectful of all races, genders and sexual orientations. I'm kind of puzzled over the whole "bad cop" thing, because the media tends to make everything sort of binary, like it can't imagine a good cop doing a bad thing or a bad cop doing a good thing (and far be it from me to stick up for bad cops, that's not my intention here) but something tells me that the real world is a bit more complicated than movies, which also have to fall back on very simple stereotypes. Is a bad cop somebody with a 20-year service record who suddenly makes a mistake one day, or was he ALWAYS bad, but was just somehow able to hide that for 20 years? Or is the public just getting enough information about which cops are good and which are bad? How do we identify the racist ones, or the ones likely to use deadly force and re-train them, or fire them if they can't be retrained? I can't imagine that there are any simple solutions here. We don't want people in other jobs to be fired if they're gay, but we're OK with cops being fired if they're racist? That seems like a fairly fine line to draw. (Again, BOO racist cops, I'm firmly against them, but finding them is going to require judging people for their thoughts and feelings, a tricky thing to do at best.)
But I'm getting off track. We know that we won't have to deal with "bad cops" any more now that the TV show "COPS" has been cancelled. "Bad Boys, Bad Boys", right? What'cha gonna do when they come for you and cancel your show? That show had been on the air long enough, I think - and it only existed in the first place because of a writer's strike back in the day, and that was a show made of found footage that didn't need writers! Damn, I did it again, I got off the track. OK, back to "The Vault". I mean, "The Trust".
Officer Stone notices in the file of a low-level drug dealer that when he got bailed out, someone paid $200,000 in cash. To him that's a big red flag, but should it be? Would anybody really be surprised that a drug dealer had access to that much money? It seems to me that the only conclusion to draw here is that this unsuccessful drug dealer who got caught had a friend who was a more successful drug dealer who didn't get caught. But it raises Officer Stone's suspicions for some reason, and he goes undercover in the Vegas casino where that guy works as a valet to see what he can find. And what he learns is that the tips he earns in a week is more than he makes as a cop. So, naturally he quits and becomes a casino manager, movie over. Just kidding.
His investigation leads him to an abandoned grocery store that takes in a lot of deliveries from the casinos, from laundry trucks and such, only nothing ever seems to get picked up from the store. Plus, it's an abandoned store, so what's the deal? A little research with the city building permits reveals that the store had a very large, fancy meat locker installed, despite being out of business and abandoned. So the logical conclusion is that the meat locker has been turned into some kind of safe for illegal money and/or valuables. Actually, considering this is set in Las Vegas, the best conclusion to draw is, "We'd better stay the hell away from this abandoned store in the desert, unless we want to get killed."
But he and his trainee/protege instead decide to rob the mob, or whoever owns this store, over the course of a quiet night, by drilling in from the apartment above the store, all they have to do is subdue that tenant, who's probably some little old lady who answered an ad for a cheap apartment above an abandoned store, tenant must deal with shady characters coming and going at all hours of the night. Umm, yeah, sure. These cops research the store, the safe, the type of drill they're going to need, but they don't take one minute to figure out who lives above the store? Umm, so are they good at this or not? I thought the tagline was "Bad Cops Make the Best Criminals", not "Bad Cops Make Criminals Who Neglect to Do All their Homework"? Why did the guy who planned the heist, the timing, the damned escape route and even the victory party afterwards drop the ball on this?
In the thick of things, despite their success in this enterprise, the wisdom of getting away with this "perfect" crime starts to split the two men apart. If "Motherless Brooklyn" was a throwback to "Chinatown", this one might be referencing "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", if you know what I mean. Or perhaps things might have worked out, only certain people are planners and doers, and other people are unconsciously self-sabotagers who are afraid of succeeding. That's one way to look at it, anyway.
Another way of looking at it is, that's Las Vegas for you. Maybe being a cop in Las Vegas is a bit like being a gambler in Las Vegas, you can keep your day job and do OK, or you can keep risking everything to try and get that big score, which always feels like it's JUST out of your reach. And if you should hit the jackpot one day, the smart thing to do would be to quit playing and never gamble again, that's the only sure way to keep all of your winnings - only nobody ever does that. One small win fools you into thinking that a bigger one is coming, but that's an illusion. In the end, the only way to make money from a casino is to work for one, but that's no fun. (Or maybe slip and get injured on their property and sue them, that could also work.)
It was nice to see parts of Vegas again, I was there last October for 8 days, 6 of which were fun. We gambled in in almost 20 casinos, so I spread my losses around, only turned a profit in one of them. I should have quit playing after my win, but it was on the second damn day, so I continued and lost a bundle. Oh, well, at least I hit five casino buffets, saw some shows, the Mob museum, the neon sign museum, and an exhibit of artifacts from the Titanic. I have no plans to return any time soon, but I'm eager to get back to Atlantic City once it re-opens, provided they re-open the buffets as well.
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Elijah Wood (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Sky Ferreira (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Jerry Lewis (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Kenna James, Kevin Weisman (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Steven Williams (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw").
RATING: 5 out of 10 vehicles at the police auction
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