The Mastermind (2025)

The absolute best thing you can say about this movie is that you will always know exactly what time it is while watching it. I have never looked at my watch more. In a movie named "The Mastermind" you'd be excused for expecting anything that required forethought. You would be disappointed. At best, the storyline of this movie was half completed before they gave up on it and just decided it was a good place to put some end credits. The music absolutely never matches the mood of the movie, and at one point you decide that the next time you see a person playing a drum set, you will in fact make them wear the snare drum. I've never been angry at background music before. This movie is beyond boring. Never see it. If someone suggests you watch it, stop being their friend.

I wonder if the Frenchmen who just raided the Louvre in Paris maybe had a sneak preview screening of this, first? It’s all about the struggling “JB” (Josh O’Connor) who has come up with a cunning wheeze to raise some much needed cash seeing as his architect skills aren’t exactly in demand. There’s a modern art gallery in their town where the security guard is usually napping, and where the paintings are relatively poorly protected hanging on the walls. He decides to purloin four of them and then sell them on… Of course, the best laid plans and all that and though the robbery itself doesn’t prove so difficult, his choice of fellow felons soon means that his identity is no surprise to cops and (other) robbers alike. He’s going to have to split else he, and quite possibly his wife and two boisterous children, are in trouble. This has got to be the most glacially paced heist movie I have ever seen, and though O’Connor delivers well enough, there simply isn’t enough plot nor is there anything much to do for anyone else as the film turns into a sort of busman’s travelogue before an ending that didn’t really sit so well with me at all. It does have a very authentic look to it and the two young siblings deliver quite enthusiastically but Alana Haim simply hasn’t got very much to do as his wife “Terri” and I felt it just fizzled out far too early in it’s all but two hours duration. I watched this on my own in the cinema which is maybe a little unfair to it, but as I left I wasn’t really that surprised. One for the telly, I’d say.