‘Masterplan’ Prime Video Review: Stanley Tucci Leads A Mona Lisa Heist Movie That Plays Like A Long Pilot Episode

Quick to consume and quicker to forget, Masterplan is one of those international productions that tend to land on streaming platforms without anyone much noticing. With Stanley Tucci in the lead, this prototypical heist movie may get a closer look than most, but at heart it doesn’t stand out from the pack. It tells the most classic heist imaginable, lifting the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and adds a family twist that barely leaves a distinguishing mark. And not much else.

Besides the actor from The Devil Wears Prada, the film stars Victor Belmondo (yes, Jean-Paul’s grandson) and Simona Tabasco, known internationally for the second season of The White Lotus. They’re the ones who get the story going: in parallel, we watch each of them pull off an elaborate robbery of the kind only professionals can manage. Jay (Belmondo) is French and Chiara (Tabasco) is Italian. Both log on to a website, perhaps the most charming detail in the whole film, that works like a social network for criminals and lets them pick their next destination. They choose the same one and find themselves face to face outside a mansion on Lake Como.

But it turns out there’s nothing to steal there. They’ve been tricked, or rather invited under somewhat false pretenses, by a man named Roger (Tucci), a veteran British thief with a few things to tell them. First, that the two young people are siblings. Second, that they’re both his children. And third, that he has brought them together for a «family plan»: stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. A bit much, no? The truth is that, while the doubts are many, the temptation is enormous, and the three head to Paris with six days to prepare the job.

From there on, the film toys a little with the tensions between siblings who didn’t know they were siblings, but mostly it settles into the minute-by-minute mechanics of the heist, an elaborate affair with both physical and virtual components that could only happen in the imagination of screenwriters. Masterplan spends its time on the friction among the three as each handles their role in the job. After that comes another half hour of movie, which curiously may be the best of its three parts.

Masterplan is one of those films that, from the opening minutes, reek of international co-production. With Belmondo and Tabasco speaking a halting English, and with Tucci seeming to glide through the film without breaking a sweat, this work by a veteran French director of movies and, above all, TV series like Bodyguard and Reacher has all the look of the latter: a long episode of some series in which we meet the characters and their first adventures. Many of the exterior scenes have a whiff of being shot or enhanced with AI, since they gleam more like a video game than anything else.

The final stretch at least has the intrigue that builds once we start to notice that the traps and lies run deeper than they seemed, and that things aren’t quite what we’ve been shown. This happens not once but three or four times, shifting the film’s axis constantly. None of it makes much sense, but at least here the viewer manages, if they haven’t already tuned out, to climb out of the routine and mediocrity on display until then. These games about what’s true, what’s false and what we’ve actually been watching are as improbable as stealing a Da Vinci from the Louvre, but a little more entertaining.