The Vault (2021)
Directed by Jaume Balagueró
No — The Vault is not woke, scoring 2 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Jaume Balagueró's The Vault concerns a Cambridge engineering prodigy recruited into a crew of thieves who intend to breach the Bank of Spain during the 2010 World Cup, when the noise of a nation watching football might mask the sound of a very large scale being frozen with nitrogen.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is composed of European actors in roles that do not appear designed to signal modern diverse representation. No evidence of representation casting as a thematic or marketing priority.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes in the film. The plot is a conventional heist thriller with no queer content.
A woman is part of the heist crew and is competent, but the film does not advance a feminist agenda or critique patriarchy. Female characters exist within standard genre roles.
The film does not engage with race, racism, or racial identity as themes. Its conflicts are about treasure, engineering, and international finance.
Oil companies are briefly mentioned as recruiters Thom rejects, but this is not a climate crusade or environmentalist message. The film has no climate-focused narrative.
The heist targets a bank and a government-seized treasure, but the motive is personal gain and salvage rights, not anti-capitalist revolution. There is no eat-the-rich messaging.
The film does not address body image, body diversity, or body positivity. No such themes are present.
Thom is a gifted engineering student, but his intelligence is presented as a standard genre skill rather than neurodivergence. No neurodivergent identity or advocacy appears.
The story is fictional and only loosely inspired by a real salvage dispute, without reinterpreting history for ideological purposes. No revisionist history marker is present.
The film is a straightforward heist thriller and does not pause to deliver social or political lectures. It prioritizes plot mechanics over moral instruction.
Why it received this score
Jaume Balagueró's The Vault concerns a Cambridge engineering prodigy recruited into a crew of thieves who intend to breach the Bank of Spain during the 2010 World Cup, when the noise of a nation watching football might mask the sound of a very large scale being frozen with nitrogen. It is a heist picture assembled with genuine mechanical care. The vault floods if its weight shifts. The solution arrives, as solutions in such films do, from a cocktail glass. There is a competent woman on the crew, a hacker, a con artist, and a traitor in the ranks, all arranged with the tidy symmetry of a schematic.
On the matter of contemporary social instruction, the film is silent. Nobody pauses to explain the moral architecture of the world. The oil companies that court our hero are waved away as a career he declines, which is a personal preference and not a position on extraction. The Spaniards are Spanish, the thieves are thieves, and the treasure is a box of Drake coins that everyone agrees belongs to whoever can carry it out. Race goes unmentioned. So does gender, in any argumentative sense. So do the body, the climate, and the accumulated grievances of the age.
The result is a film that behaves like a heist thriller from an earlier decade: competent, mildly forgettable, and entirely uninterested in being anything else. Rotten Tomatoes settled at sixty percent, which feels about right for a picture whose greatest ambition is to get three people out of a flooded basement. It offers no sermon, no reckoning, no corrective to the historical record. For the purposes of classification, this is a clean ledger. A film can be slight without being instructive, and this one is.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Madrid, Spain, 2010. While the whole city follows the national team's successful participation in the World Cup, a group of daring thieves look for a way into one of the most secure and guarded places on the planet.
Questions about The Vault
Is The Vault woke?
No — The Vault is not woke, scoring 2 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Vault have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does The Vault compare to other 2021 movies?
It ranks #231 of the 242 films from 2021 we've scored; their average is 23. The wokest is The Forever Purge (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.