Jacob Cooney's The Assault an Assault on Heist Films

The tagline for the film reads, "Every Heist Needs a Getaway."

This film is a good excuse to exercise the getaway before getting into the heist.

The action, such as it is, happens in a small town town where Detective Tom Broza (TOM SIZEMORE) has just relocated from the big city of New York. Why he left, we don't know, but we can surmise that Bruza was too incompetent to be kept on the force given the way he handles this case.

Lindsay (JORDAN LADD) is an abused housewife, who's husband Seth (TOM DENUCCI) apparently runs a shady business. Or maybe not a shady business. We don't know. We know the cops say they don't give him a hard time because he keeps everything on the up and up. Well, I would hope that's the case. I'd hate to think police went around harassing legal business owners on the hunch that they might be less than legal. Lindsay works with Nicole (NIKKI MOORE), a stripper who keeps her bikini on while pole dancing, even though her fellow dancers have their breasts bared. Together, they are planning to rob a shipment of cash coming in to her husband -- yes, a shipment of cash. Just being shipped. Not a bank transfer, not a check, an actual duffel bag of dollar bills. Maybe he bought the money off Amazon, for all the sense this makes. And what's more, the police know it's coming, because Seth has been bragging all around town that he's got a shipment of cash coming in to his business.

Lindsey and Nicole's big plan to steal the cash involves masks, voice changers, guns -- and practice robberies, like a convenience store and a poker game. Because both of those will tell you everything you need to pull off a major heist. And since these are only practice runs, they torch the cars after each holdup, leaving the cash in the back seat.

Broza meets Nicole at the strip club when he goes in to ask the bartender if she's seen anyone suspicious come in lately. Because a strip club is the place to go to discuss lowlife activities when you're new in town.

The screenplay for THE ASSAULT is from Director Jacob Cooney, and I get the distinct impression that it was a loose set of scenes where the actors were given the latitude to ad-lib their way through them. Moore seems to be able to at least speak her lines with confidence, but Sizemore is all over the place, talking over other actors, repeating himself, struggling to get from Point A to Point B. That his character and Moore's end up in a relationship together only makes the Detective seem even more clueless.

There's no big twist here. There's not even a little twist. In fact, the simplicity that THE ASSAULT adheres to makes one wonder how they could have screwed it up so badly. This is one of those DVDs where the previews were more enthralling than the main feature.