The Vault, released in some regions as Way Down, is a 2021 Spanish heist thriller directed by Jaume Balagueró, made on a budget of around fifteen million euros and running 118 minutes. It stars Freddie Highmore as Thom, a young engineering prodigy fresh out of Cambridge, alongside Liam Cunningham, Sam Riley, Famke Janssen, and Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey. The plot follows a crew of treasure hunters who, after having a recovered fortune seized by the Spanish government, recruit Thom to help them break into the legendarily impenetrable vault beneath the Bank of Spain, timing the job to coincide with the 2010 World Cup final while the entire nation is distracted.

Whenever I watch one of these big crew, big score, big twist heist films, I find myself measuring it against the gold standard, which for me is and always has been Ocean's Eleven. That is simply the bar. Any film choosing to enter this genre has knowingly signed up for that comparison. So the honest answer to how The Vault holds up is: not well. Critics at the time made much the same observation, describing it as carrying clear echoes of better films like Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job, with its slickly engineered thrills ultimately dulled by familiarity.

My first stumbling block is admittedly a personal one. Highmore's Thom is a genius engineer, and I could not stop seeing the character he plays on The Good Doctor. For the entire runtime, some part of my brain was braced for him to start announcing his credentials. The film does itself no favours here either, because as Variety noted at the time, the script reminds you that Thom is a boy genius roughly every five minutes, in case the point failed to land the first dozen times. It is a performance that never quite escapes the shadow of his more famous role.

Liam Cunningham, by contrast, is a genuine pleasure, as he tends to be in everything. He makes a perfect crew captain and brings a weathered charisma the film badly needs. The remaining cast members were, in the gentlest possible terms, present. They turned up, they performed their functions, and I struggled to recall much about any of them afterwards.

To the film's credit, it does have one genuinely interesting hook, and it is rooted in reality. The vault beneath the Bank of Spain really does feature a security system involving an underground river that floods the chamber if the walls are breached, meaning any successful break-in risks drowning the thieves inside. That is a fantastic premise for a set piece, and the film builds its central sequence around it. And yet, even with that, my reaction landed somewhere around a mild nod of approval rather than genuine excitement. The idea is stronger than the execution.