"Masterplan" is everything a heist movie shouldn't be The film starring Stanley Tucci, Simona Tabasco and Victor Belmondo is available on Prime Video

"Palazzo Chigi, the Mona Lisa is coming home." Any film featuring a line like that could never be taken seriously. But then again, with Masterplan, an original Prime Video production, you didn't need to wait for that line to figure it out. The film is directed by Thomas Vincent, and several hands contributed to the screenplay, which is ultimately credited primarily to the director alongside collaborator David Wolstencroft (with additional story contributions from Giacomo Durzi, Alessandro Fabbri, and Alberto Vignati). A heist movie about nothing less than the theft of Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece, written and directed as though it were the simplest thing in the world — or perhaps even worse, as though someone had just started writing about cinema and chose the idea that is simultaneously the most difficult and the most clichéd.

Nothing to do with the real events that unfolded in 2025 at the Louvre Museum in a truly remarkable heist: the story of a gang of thieves disguised as workmen who managed to break into the building and steal some of the most precious jewels on display, once belonging to Napoleon and the Crown of France. A far more compelling and captivating affair than anything Masterplan has to offer — proof that reality can sometimes outdo fiction, and in this case does so with ease.

The film brings together multiple international forces, most visibly in its cast. Leading the operation is Stanley Tucci, who passes himself off as British, flanked by Frenchman Victor Belmondo (grandson of icon Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Italian Simona Tabasco, who is increasingly making her mark on projects beyond Italy following her appearance in season two of The White Lotus. It amounts to a waste of talent, given how unwieldy the trio proves to be — whether the fault lies with the screenplay or their performances hardly matters. They work together to steal the Mona Lisa, but fail to make a convincing film in which they must pose as a reunited family: Tucci's character, the mastermind of the operation, has summoned his children who didn't know they were siblings, giving them the chance to spend some quality time together — getting to know one another while pulling off the heist of the century.

There is no chemistry between the young actors, and ultimately none with their fictional father either. Nor does there appear to be any real character development, beyond defining each person by their specific criminal skill set: she is a tech-savvy hacker, he is an explosives expert. These are among the least irreverent and engaging rogues you're likely to find in this kind of film, and they fail to make either the theft they've been hired to carry out or the discovery of their shared family ties feel remotely exciting. Everything is handled with such superficiality that it paradoxically makes everything the characters face seem trivially easy: from recovering the painting to accepting the existence of a father, from their madcap escape attempts to their reconciliation after doubts and betrayals.

A film whose simplicity is in fact hollowness, and whose sloppiness betrays a lack of quality that becomes more glaring with every scene and every plot twist — so much so that it fails to do justice even to a genre as reliably entertaining as the heist movie, leaving you almost wishing the Mona Lisa had never been stolen at all.