THE VAULT (2005)

Lets get straight to the point here - The Vault falls way short of its intended mark thanks to some totally inept direction. It has many other problems but by far the most glaring is Ric Moxley's heinous attempt to construct a serious action flick. Almost the entire main cast has had extensive training in some form of martial arts. Laci Szabo is a real-life expert with edge weapons and has trained military people. Bas Rutten is a former UFC champion and knows how to kick some serious ass outside of movies. Diana Lee Inosanto's father was a student and great friend of Bruce Lee, and Bruce is an honorary uncle of Diana's. She's had some serious training as well and has done lots of stunt work in some big name films, but unfortunately the directing so clumsy, that all these skilled cast members are pretty much rendered useless.


There is a little DVD featurette on Diana Lee Inosanto, who plays a bad girl mercenary type in the film. In it, someone films Inosanto fighting during an actual scene that's being shot. Whoever shot this behind-the-scenes footage did a better job of shooting the fight than the director did for the actual movie. Inosanto looked like a very capable fighter in this footage but in the final production, she looks like an amateur. Everyone does! It's just horrible shooting. It's not clear what's going on in many of the scenes. All you have to do is keep the camera still on the action and you'd have some pretty good fights. Instead we have strange cutting and bad shots that ruin the action completely.

The Vault also suffers from dialogue that is beyond awful and songs that are played at the worst possible times. The acting is a joke for the most part. Rutten plays an evil general whose trying to pull off a big art museum heist. His performance is off but there are some moments where he's pretty funny. With some work on his acting and with a good director, Rutten could make it in big time films as one of those bad guy henchman types. Diana Lee Inosanto also shows some talent as well. Laci Szabo plays the lead hero who is trying to patch up his relationship with his daughter and gets caught up in the heist. Szabo may be able to fight, but he has zero talent when it comes to acting. He would be better suited as the strong, silent type as opposed to the talkative, idiotic, action hero type.


The wide screen picture has a few freeze-up moments, and there's a couple of grainy spots here and there but It's fine otherwise. The sound is also very capable meaning, to your cost, that you can hear all the awful dialogue being spoken very clearly. The DVD extras include the Inosanto featurette mentioned earlier which is brief but fun to watch, and there are some fairly in-depth cast bios as well. There's a slide show, a music video, and trailers for a couple of other MTI films as well. So a talented martial arts cast goes to waste in The Vault. Hopefully Rutten and Inosanto will get another chance in a good film to display there true fighting skills, because this movie does their talents no justice whatsoever.