They start with the literal deep dive into the Atlantic Ocean that introduces Walter Moreland (Liam Cunningham), a wealthy salvager and treasure hunter, and his second-in-command, James (Sam Riley), an ex-special ops officer, off the coast of Spain as they discover a long-lost, sunken ship, the “Virgin of Guadalupe.” Unfortunately for Walter and Sam, they’re in Spanish, not international, waters, and their discovery becomes the de facto property of the Spanish government. Put simply, they can’t, but what they can and have done is relatively straightforward: Use those limitations to their advantage. They’re not trying to compete with Ocean’s star power or Mission: Impossible’s blockbuster-sized budgets. That might sound like damning The Vault with faint praise and maybe it is, but it also falls in line with Balagueró and his collaborators’ obviously modest ambitions. Yet for all that familiarity, The Vault manages to remain a superficially engaging addition through a two-hour running time that rarely feels superfluous. Only the setting, Spain, and the year, 2010, offer any real difference from other similar genre entries. There’s little here that can be described as surprising or shocking as Balagueró, a genre director with a classically unobtrusive style, takes an international cast through comfortingly familiar plot beats-each a slight, barely noticeable iteration on the last. The Vault, a heist-thriller directed by horror veteran Jaume Balagueró (the REC series), is nothing if not a formulaic film that apparently took five screenwriters to develop it into a relatively coherent script.
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