Prime Video's first 'Masterplan' teaser puts Stanley Tucci on a Mona Lisa heist with his long-lost kids

Amazon dropped the first teaser for Masterplan this week, and it arrived with a date attached: October 16, streaming on Prime Video in more than 240 countries. It also arrived with a premise that is either the best thing about the movie or the first thing to worry about, depending on how much rope you hand a heist comedy that opens on a paternity reveal.

Here is the setup. A career thief decides to steal the Mona Lisa. He hires two young specialists to help him do it: Chiara, an Italian cybercrime expert, and Jay, a French explosives guy. Once they are committed, he tells them the detail he left out of the job. They are his children. Half-siblings who have never met, recruited into the same crew by a father who apparently thought the Louvre was a reasonable place to hold a family reunion. Prime Video's own logline promises the three of them will have to "learn to work together" and "try not to kill each other." That is the movie, and the teaser is happy to let you know it.

The casting is the pitch

Stanley Tucci plays the thief, and that single choice carries most of the teaser. Tucci has spent a long career being the smartest, driest person in whatever room he walks into, and a con man who treats his own kids as assets to be deployed is a part built for exactly that register. You can see the movie betting everything on his ability to make a genuinely lousy thing to do to your children play as charming. Whether that bet pays off is the whole question, and a ninety-second teaser is not going to answer it.

The kids are the interesting gamble. Simona Tabasco, sharp and combustible in the second season of The White Lotus, gets Chiara. Victor Belmondo, recently in the French thriller Bastion 36, gets Jay. A heist comedy lives or dies on whether the crew actually bounces off each other, and here the crew has to do double duty as a family that resents being one. If Tabasco and Belmondo can make the sibling friction feel lived-in rather than scripted, the movie has somewhere to go beyond the vault. If they cannot, no amount of Louvre production design will save it.

Who made it

Masterplan is directed by Thomas Vincent, who ran a lot of Reacher for Prime Video and knows how to stage a set piece for a streaming audience. He co-wrote it with David Wolstencroft, the BAFTA-winning creator of Spooks, working from a story credited to Giacomo Durzi, Alessandro Fabbri, Alberto Vignati, Wolstencroft, and Vincent. It is a French-Italian production, co-produced by Gaumont with Amazon MGM Studios, and shot across France and Italy. That European pedigree matters, because the teaser has the look of a caper that would rather be witty than loud, closer to an old Gaumont crime comedy than to the American demolition-derby version of the genre.

What a teaser can and cannot tell you

A teaser sells a feeling, not a film, and this one sells a specific feeling: light on its feet, in on its own joke, more interested in the people than the plan. That is a real style, and when it works, a heist comedy is one of the most reliable pleasures the form offers. When it does not, you get a lot of attractive people in nice coats explaining a plan you stop caring about.

The Mona Lisa is a canny target for this kind of movie. It is the most famous painting on earth and, sitting behind glass in a permanently mobbed room, one of the least practical things to actually steal, which is precisely why heist writers keep reaching for it. The reveal that the crew is secretly a family is the swing here, the thing that could lift Masterplan above a competent Prime Video weekend watch or sink it into sitcom. Vincent and Wolstencroft have written enough to know the difference. October will show whether they pulled it off.

Masterplan streams on Prime Video starting October 16.