Stanley Tucci chews the scenery—and tries to steal the Mona Lisa—in Masterplan

It's an Ocean's Italy (and France) in Prime Video's uninspired international heist.

By Caroline Siede | October 17, 2026 | 10:00am

Photo: Amazon MGM Studios

Film Reviews Stanley Tucci

Stanley Tucci chews the scenery—and tries to steal the Mona Lisa—in Masterplan

If streaming has made the line between film and TV thinner than ever, then Prime Video’s lighthearted heist movie Masterplan is here to obliterate it entirely. For all intents and purposes, it looks and feels like it should be the pilot for a CBS series that airs between Tracker and Matlock. But it’s somewhat more improbably a French-Italian co-production that stars beloved character actor Stanley Tucci as an elegant art thief who ropes in two strangers (or are they?) for an impossible gig. Much as Nicolas Cage once set out to nab the Declaration Of Independence, Tucci’s plummy British thief Roger Cavendish wants to steal the Mona Lisa. Cue the secret tunnels under the Louvre and the requisite scene where someone rolls under a gate as it’s closing.

Masterplan knows it’s ridiculous, which helps with its watchability if not exactly its quality. Working with what seems to be a Guy Ritchie mood board and a 50-euro budget, French director Thomas Vincent conjures up an appreciably colorful, if often weirdly empty world that’s lit like a pharmaceutical commercial. To pull off his titular “masterplan,” Roger uses a criminal underworld version of Tinder to enlist two young co-conspirators: Italian tech whiz Chiara (The White Lotus‘ Simona Tabasco) and French explosives expert Jay (Victor Belmondo). Soon enough, the eclectic trio form a makeshift family.

From there, the movie goes through the Ocean’s Eleven motions with plenty of goofy scouting missions where the thieves adopt over-the-top disguises while bickering and bantering about whether they can truly trust each other. There’s an evil buyer to up the stakes and an onscreen countdown to the date of the heist, not to mention the cheapest looking “hi-tech” gadgets international money can buy. If you were watching with the sound off, you might think the whole thing is a parody. But while there’s a bit of 1960s farce in the mix (think How To Steal A Million by way of Pink Panther), the cast are mostly earnest while delivering lines like, “Every heist is impossible until someone proves otherwise.”

Given the paper-thin nature of the story, it’s helpful to have an actor of Tucci’s caliber onboard. He doesn’t elevate the material, exactly, but he at least makes Masterplan feel like more of a real movie than it is. The trouble comes when it’s time for the actual heist, which Vincent just doesn’t have the budget to stage in a particularly interesting or compelling way. The stakes are supposed to come from Roger, Chiara, and Jay learning to care for and rely on one another, but the idea of being emotionally invested in anything that happens here is less believable than the concept of stealing the Mona Lisa.

As can be expected with this kind of movie, there are twists and turns that make a seemingly simple story more complicated, although it becomes increasingly interminable waiting for them to arrive. Masterplan runs 109 minutes and would have been far more entertaining at a fleet 75. The best, most original stuff is in the third act, but it takes an awfully long time to get there. Still, viewers who make it until the end will at least have had their time pleasantly wasted.

Director: Thomas Vincent
Writer: Thomas Vincent, David Wolstencrof
Starring: Stanley Tucci, Simona Tabasco, Victor Belmondo
Release Date: October 16, 2026 (Prime Video)

Join the discussion...

Keep scrolling for more great stories.