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TV-MA | 1 h 49 min | Drama | 2026
Even the most fastidious art aficionados agree on one thing about Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait masterpiece, the “Mona Lisa.” Her knowing smile suggests she knows something viewers don’t. The protagonist of this new heist drama echoes that knowing in an offbeat way.
Strangers to each other, young Chiara Ferraro (Simona Tabasco) and young Jérémie, or Jay Mercier (Victor Belmondo), seem content being small-time thieves—she in Italy, he in France.
She wields new-world skills to rob digital vaults, of cryptocurrency, for instance. He deploys old-world discreet detonation to rob real-world vaults of gold artifacts, for instance.
Suddenly, they’re robbed of anonymity. A third thief, a fatherly stranger, invites their old and new, real and digital worlds to collaborate.
Impossible Caper
That stranger, long-retired master-thief Roger Cavendish (Stanley Tucci), has a master plan for his new proteges. He hires them for the heist of a lifetime—stealing the Mona Lisa from France’s hallowed Louvre.
Awkwardly, he announces that he’s their long-lost, once-wayward father who’d abandoned their respective mothers. Contrite, he’s now hoping the three of them can, “as a family,” pull off this near-impossible caper.
Now supposed siblings, the youngsters agree. But Roger’s cryptic meeting with an even stranger figure, the menacing, wheelchair-bound Bruno van Klum (Mark Ivanir), makes them suspect something’s off.
Unsurprisingly, Italian writers Giacomo Durzi, Alessandro Fabbri, and Alberto Vignati imbue their story with Italian sensibilities. Unlike slicker, action-heavy Steven Soderbergh or Guy Ritchie genre films, their slower-paced yarn revolves more around relationships than robberies.
French screenwriter-director Thomas Vincent and his American screenwriter David Wolstencroft have their onscreen trio spend more time bonding or bickering than plotting or pulling off their heist.
Not all scenes land convincingly; some choreography is too contrived. Witness the two youngsters, strangers until then, hurriedly agree to burgle the residence Roger picks to test them jointly. No due diligence. No prior agreement on divvying up pickings.
French producer Sidonie Dumas lends a global flavor to her Europe-centered production, superbly supported by cinematographer Matteo Cocco.
Vincent makes tasteful use of flashforwards, flashbacks, wipe-transitions and wipe-based split-screens. He deploys slow-motion only once, but makes it count.
Understandably, the veteran ethnic Italian Tucci, respected for playing a range of characters, bad and benign, hogs screen time. But young Tabasco and Belmondo shine too, bringing a winsome mix of juvenile smugness and childlike vulnerability to their roles.
Belmondo is the grandson of French action star Jean-Paul Belmondo. The young actor isn’t in the stuntman mold of his grandfather, but he carries that easy, endearingly unselfconscious air about him.
Cinematically, Vincent mimics the sfumato technique that Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” betrays. It involves translucent layers of paint overlaying opaque ones. The technique smooths tonal and color transitions, softens edges, and enriches aesthetic depth. It reveals something vital by concealing something relatively trivial.
That something precious is hidden makes its revelation twice as treasured; it’s a wisdom contained in the idiom, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Roger sheepishly confesses something to his “children” over a pasta dinner. He’d imagined they resented his fatherly absence, having missed his presence growing up. But it’s he who resented his own absence and missed their presence all along.
Portrait Connections
Typically, portraits appear to beckon viewers into their reality, somewhere in the past. The “Mona Lisa” inverts that. She appears to connect, even uninvited, with the viewer’s reality—not just in the past, but in the present and future, too.
She seems to smile, not only about what’s happening in the viewer’s world, but also about what’s going to happen. Here, Roger proxies for the “Mona Lisa,” smiling as wordlessly, if not as enigmatically, when asked to explain himself in a decisive scene. Like her, he’s a riddle to be solved.
From first seeing Roger as selfish, Chiara and Jay soon see themselves as selfish instead. A spot of eavesdropping leads them to believe he’s leaving them his fortune even as they’ve been questioning his sincerity. It’s as if they’re admitting that how we see, know, and even love others shapes how we see, know, and love ourselves, and vice versa.
Cinematically, Vincent likens coldness to fakeness, and warmth to authenticity. No, a paternity test doesn’t make a father, any more than childbirth makes a mother.
The real deal isn’t fatherhood (or motherhood); it’s the intimacy, openness, and trust that must follow. It’s as if Vincent wants his viewers to sing with Nat King Cole those probing lines from his immortal track, “Mona Lisa”:
“Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?”
You can watch “Masterplan” on Prime Video.
‘Masterplan’
Director: Thomas Vincent
Starring: Stanley Tucci, Victor Belmondo, Simona Tabasco
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Release Date: Oct. 16, 2026
Rated: 3 stars out of 5
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