Masterplan Review: Stanley Tucci Deserves a Better Heist Film

Masterplan is worth watching if you are here for Stanley Tucci and light pulpy heist business, and not worth much else. Thomas Vincent's film arrived on Amazon Prime Video in the United States on October 16, 2026, runs 110 minutes, and puts a heist caper on your screen in place of a theatrical run. Critics have been cold so far. Rotten Tomatoes has nine critic reviews on it, three of them positive, and Metacritic will not publish a score until it has four. Every figure in this review was checked on October 21, 2026.

The audience side is small but not empty. Letterboxd's member average is 2.4 from 4,235 ratings and 1,325 written reviews, TMDB has 7.08 from 118 votes, and JustWatch's own score is 66 percent from 136 ratings. The first hour of the film is decent pulpy fun, and the last stretch is where it stops working.

Spoiler-free verdict: Worth watching if you are here for Stanley Tucci and pulpy heist business, and you can stop watching before the twist arrives. A 110-minute Prime Video caper with Tucci, Simona Tabasco and Victor Belmondo, directed by Thomas Vincent. Nine critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, three of them positive, and 2.4 on Letterboxd as of October 21, 2026. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Masterplan is about

Roger is a veteran thief, and he wants the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre. To do it he needs two young specialists, so he finds them on what the film calls a criminal version of Tinder. Chiara (Simona Tabasco) is an Italian cybersecurity expert who can talk her way into anything digital. Jay (Victor Belmondo) is a French explosives specialist. They meet for the first time while breaking into a mansion on the shore of Lake Geneva, and the sparks between them are immediate and distracting.

Roger tells them he is their father. He also tells them they are brother and sister, which means the flirtation at the mansion is a problem nobody in the film wants to solve. What they are actually doing is a decade-old plan. The heist involves drones, a forgotten tunnel under the Louvre, truffle-related espionage, and a few tricks that are smarter than the film needs them to be. The trick that sticks is a helium balloon.

Masterplan cast and performances

Tucci plays Roger with the air of a man who has read the same book twice and can still quote it, and he is the film's best argument for watching. He sends up the suave European mastermind and slides into parody when the character needs more than charm.

Simona Tabasco plays Chiara with more energy than the part requires. She is the breakout of the second season of The White Lotus, and she plays a hacker as if she has opinions about hardware. Victor Belmondo plays Jay as a swaggering presence with a fake accent, and he is the grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo, which is either a casting joke or a small piece of casting luck. Philippe Uchan plays Bartoli and Mark Ivanir plays Bruno, the second pair of hands in Roger's crew.

What works

The first hour. Vincent stages the scouting missions with real energy, the cast bickers like people who have just met and are already regretting it, and the dialogue is allowed to be funny. Caroline Siede in The A.V. Club summed up the bargain the film is offering: "Masterplan knows it's ridiculous, which helps with its watchability if not exactly its quality." Her deck for the review called it "an Ocean's Italy (and France)" and "Prime Video's uninspired international heist," which is a fair description of the ambition.

The locations. Paris and the French countryside give the film somewhere handsome to stand, and the production design has the gloss of an expensive commercial. Vincent directed episodes of Bodyguard, and the muscle here comes from the same muscle as the spy thriller, which is why the middle of the film moves.

Tucci. He is a generous, funny lead in a film that does not always deserve him, and the moments where he is doing almost nothing are better than the explosions.

What doesn't

The third act. Owen Myers in The Guardian had the best summary of what goes wrong: "Even as the plot becomes increasingly ridiculous, ample bangs and explosions ensure that the nearly two-hour runtime doesn't totally drag. The best you can offer Masterplan is faint praise: it could breeze by as company to your Sunday night takeout even if you will struggle to remember it a week later." Simon Gallagher in Screen Rant was harsher about the same stretch, calling the ending "utter nonsense, with more farcical twists added in place of actual narrative substance and a complete lack of logical build."

The twist is telegraphed. Two professional thieves take the word of a professional stranger about a job this size, and the third act stacks swerves on top of each other until nothing underneath is holding. Jonathon Wilson in Ready Steady Cut took the whole picture apart in one line: "Proper, unabashed, unequivocal rubbish, with nothing about it worthy of even a cursory recommendation."

The running time and the release. The film is 110 minutes, and Screen Rant's Simon Gallagher noted that it still "feels about 20 minutes too long." Amazon gave the movie a weekend where it was not the company's priority, and the Guardian's Owen Myers noticed that the studio was burying it behind its romance Love of Your Life.

What audiences say

The audience numbers are thin but they exist. Rotten Tomatoes has nine critic reviews on the film, three of them positive, and the Popcornmeter has fewer than 50 ratings, 11 of them positive and 19 not, so it is too early for a real audience score. Metacritic's user score has not opened yet for the same reason. Letterboxd's member average is 2.4 from 4,235 ratings and 1,325 written reviews. TMDB has it at 7.08 from 118 votes, which is the most generous number attached to this film anywhere. JustWatch's own score is 66 percent from 136 ratings. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026.

Where to watch Masterplan

Masterplan is streaming in the United States on Amazon Prime Video, with a second listing on Prime Video with Ads. JustWatch checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and found no free tier and no other service carrying it, and TMDB's US provider list agrees with that. On the same day JustWatch had it at number 61 on its daily US streaming chart, down 19 places since the day before, a reasonable showing for a title the company barely pushed. The runtime is 110 minutes, and every listing carries a closed-captions badge with twelve languages available, English included.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Masterplan streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Masterplan worth watching? If you want a Stanley Tucci caper to put on a Sunday with the sound on and something else going on in the next room, yes, and the time will pass. If you want a heist film with a brain, no. The Guardian's "faint praise" is about right, and the A.V. Club's "watchability if not exactly its quality" is the whole review in five words. Tucci should have been given a better script and a release somebody cared about.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Masterplan

Roger is not their father. He never was. The whole recruitment was a con, and the Mona Lisa job was the bait to get two young specialists to do the work for him. When Jay and Chiara open the boot of the car where they last saw the painting, it is gone. A hidden mechanism pushed it out on the road and left it with Roger, and the payday he promised was never coming either, because the Mona Lisa cannot be sold. Roger had a debt to settle with a dangerous buyer and the painting was the price.

Jay and Chiara track him down using the pacemaker he is wearing, which is the detail the film thinks is cleverest. They arrive during the handover and turn his escape into a mess. Roger lets them go through the tunnel on the French-Italian border that he had meant to use for himself, and then he turns himself in. He also drops the accent, because he is not English at all. He is from New Jersey, and the moustache was fake.

The epilogue has Chiara and Jay breaking Roger out of prison, which neither of them has a good reason to do. The painting the buyer received was an extremely convincing forgery. The real Mona Lisa is hanging on the wall of a restaurant in plain view, where everyone assumes it is a copy.