It’s nothing fresh, no mind boggler, but it purely works on the entertainment factor. The John Travolta starrer Cash Out is tropey in every way, and it still manages to not be boring at any point. Long past his prime, Travolta plays Mason Goddard, a swindler with a skilled crew carrying out heists. When a simple bank robbery goes haywire, Mason and his group must find their way out of it.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?
Mason and his girlfriend Amelia visit a private jet exhibition, and they don’t seem interested in the aircraft. Mr. Perez, the man who invited them, takes them to show his collection of luxury sports cars. Out of all the Porsches and Lamborghinis, Mason’s eyes shine when Perez shows his most prized possession, a rare Pagani. Mason’s crew was already present in the exhibition, and they took over the garage, and he and Amelia drove off with the car. On the way, a helicopter tails the group, and that’s when Mason understands it’s an FBI craft. Mason notices Amelia getting uncomfortable, and she pulls out her gun on him. She’s been an FBI agent all along, and Mason chooses to switch to Plan B, which is basically crashing the vehicle into water. The crew makes their escape, and Mason is devastated by his girl’s betrayal. Months later, when he’s still sulking, his brother Shawn comes up with a bank robbery plan. Unaware of the trouble they’re getting themselves into, Mason and his crew find out that the secrets the bank holds are much bigger than a few million dollars.
What goes wrong in the bank?
Shawn gets hold of the bank manager outside the bank, and Mason orders him to stay there. Shawn wouldn’t listen to him and brought the manager in, and chaos ensued soon. The crew takes over the bank pretty easily. Link, the tech expert who Mason outsourced straight from Mossad, takes the cameras and live feeds under her control. Mason and Shawn go inside the vault to procure the box, which apparently has a rich woman’s crypto fortune, but it turns out to be a decoy box. Shawn got his information wrong, and now the police have surrounded the territory. To make things worse, Amelia’s been brought over to negotiate with Mason, as he is stuck with no way out.
What’s in the box?
The captured bank manager ambushes Shawn and makes a good deal before Mason catches up to him. Mason forces him to talk, and he reveals that the original box is in the building next door to the bank. It’s a part of the bank that is used for special accounts, and the location is kept a secret even from the account holders. The manager warns Mason that he shouldn’t look for the box; it belongs to the mistress of a billionaire, Abel Salazar, who funded coups to overthrow the government in three different countries. Mason should be scared, but this information only wakes up his inner wolf. He figures that if the box is kept under such protection, there’s more than just money. He thinks Salazar’s dirty secrets are in the box, and he wants to take the box himself.
How does Mason get closer to the box?
Mason asks Amelia to order the men to move 50 feet away from the bank perimeter. In his second demand, he asks for pizza for the hostages and insists that it must be Amelia who delivers it. In return, he’d have to let two hostages go every hour. Meanwhile, Shawn and Mason find the entry point to the neighboring building, and Shawn starts to break the walls down. Salazar’s liaison, Mr. Flowers, comes to Amelia and tells her that there’s no need for much negotiation and that there’ll be hell to pay if his client’s property falls into the wrong hands. Mason’s time runs out when the CIA takes over the operation from the FBI, and the special operations team is led by Cyrus, a man who’s on Salazar’s payroll.
Can Mason get to the secret box?
Commander Cyrus threatens Mason to let the hostages go and surrender right away. He makes it clear that negotiations are over, and his troops will lose patience soon. Mason doesn’t worry about the threats, and he replies with the phrase that starts with F and O. He calls Amelia to contact her friends in the media and tells her to make sure his crew is arrested by the FBI. Amelia asks what he plans to do, and he answers that he’ll be waiting in the beach house for her. After much drilling and hammering on the walls, Mason and Shawn find the secret box. It turns out to be Salazar’s personal hard drive, and Link arrives to crack it right open. Mason needs to buy some time for her, and he lets the hostages go. It’s now time for the crew to surrender themselves, and like a team with a goal up in extra time, they make sure to waste as much time as possible. Shawn apologizes to Mason for the trouble he’s caused, but the brothers hug it out before Shawn goes out. Link needs three more minutes to crack the hard drive, and Mason makes a run to the spot before special ops make their way into the bank.
Does Mason survive the explosion?
Mason stands tall after Link managed to secure the files from the hard drive. Surrounded by guns, Mason asks to see Mr. Flowers, and when refused, he blows up the building with bombs he planted earlier. Few weeks later, when Mason and Link are considered dead, Amelia is asked by the FBI about what happened to their bodies, or the box that never got found. Mason’s crew managed to run, and they went off the grid. Amelia pretends to not know anything as she makes her way back to Mason, drinking beer on his private island. Amelia asks Mason what happened down there, and Mason reveals his ultimate bargaining skills.
In Cash Out‘s ending, Mr. Flowers indeed came, and Mason bargained his way out of the mess. He demanded his crew be released and got new identities for all of them. Along with that, he got ten million dollars for every member of the crew and an additional million dollars for the bank manager and each hostage. Flowers asks Mason if he’d keep his word, but Mason is snarky, and he tells Flowers that he doesn’t have many options here. Flowers shakes hands with Mason, and they fake the bomb blast to make their way out of the bank without getting caught. Now far away from all the mess, he can finally retire with his girl by his side, having Shawn as his next-door neighbor.
Cash Out is a fun ride once you get to know Travolta’s character and his motivation. It’s not complex; he’s just a man who wants some love and luxury, and who can complain about that? In a world where capitalism prevails, Mason played Robin Hood and rewarded the hostages too when he didn’t need to do so. It’s always fun to root for a bad guy who doesn’t want to shed innocent blood for nothing, and in this movie, the bad guys are the ones you want to root for. Unlike Money Heist, this movie keeps it simple with fewer subplots and uses the tropes to their best effect.
