I may have a significant masochistic streak that I’m only just discovering because, for some reason, I simply cannot resist a direct-to-streaming-video YA “thriller” whenever I find one. Not too long ago I watched The Thinning, which starred Peyton List and a whole bunch of YouTube “stars” like Lia Marie Johnson, and had the added bonus of being a really shitty dystopian future movie as well. It was fucking terrible as one would expect from a movie made by YouTube which somehow tries to combine The Hunger Games with the SATs.

Last night after watching Taboo’s pilot I watched Coin Heist, which is a Netflix original film starring Sasha Pieterse from Pretty Little Liars and some other people who are apparently social media titans but whom I’ve never heard of. And it was absolutely awful as well.

The film purports to be some kind of weird combination of The Breakfast Club with a heist movie, because it’s about four kids from different cliques in their high school who band together to save said school from financial ruin with a plot that involves the US Mint. While I understand that a movie with that kind of plot summary is definitely designed to appeal strictly to teenagers, I honestly cannot imagine anyone with more intelligence than a spoon enjoying this movie.

It has, without a doubt, the worst heist plan - if you can even call it that - that I have seen in a film in recent memory. Despite the title and the fact that the very first scene of the film takes place inside the US Mint, the kids’ plan is not actually to steal a whole bunch of precious metals (or coins made of precious metals) from there, as one might assume. No Goldfinger-type thefts of Fort Knox here. Their plan is to modify the design of an existing quarter (it was some kind of state quarter with a fish on it, but who really cares) so that it has an error, make a couple hundred or thousand of these erroneous quarters, and then have them be sold at auction houses over time to raise the $10 million (!) that they need to save their high school. One character optimistically states that this will take about six months at most.

The plan would be ridiculous enough but what makes it even more ridiculous is that it’s carried out by four teenagers who are very clearly not qualified in the least to do this. Ironically if the movie was just about them committing old-fashioned robbery I might actually buy that these kids could do it, but instead we’re treated to scene after scene of convoluted exposition in which the characters attempt to trick the sad sacks watching this on Netflix into thinking they’re speaking actual sense about plotting a heist.

The most egregiously unbelievable character is a “nerdy” girl who is introduced when the main character, one of your tall blonde generic white dudes that these movies attempt to foist upon us as Hot Guys (gag), begs her to hack into the school’s records and change all his grades to As. This is literally the very first scene of the film following the title sequence, and I actually had to check with the person that I watched this movie with to make sure I didn’t mishear any of that, because hacking into systems to change grades is frequently dropped in this movie as if it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. The same character later says that she’s successfully hacked into - and I quote - Google, IBM, and the NSA. She also has a male best friend who plays the most annoying Nice Guy I have seen in a movie in awhile.

As fucking stupid as hackers in movies are, I sort of forgive them because they’re symptoms of writers needing shitty simple ways to resolve conflict in their stories, by virtue of hackers in movies being able to do and fix anything. Also this one is a young woman so I guess that’s some minor step towards equality if that means anything. But unfortunately the other three teenagers who make up our little band of misfits are equally badly written and unconvincingly well-equipped to pull off a “heist”.

Pieterse plays the most textbook version of the typical pretty blonde popular overachiever who secretly yearns to rebel and be a singer or something, in the most eye-rollingly idiotic version of a “I’m being forced to be smart but really I just want to be C R E A T I V E” trope I’ve seen lately. The aforementioned blonde dude (who is the love interest of the hacker girl) is a “slacker” who comes up with the whole plan to make money from modified quarters as his way of saving his father (who is the headmaster) from jail and “giving back” to the school that they all apparently can’t live without. Rounding out the primary cast is an earnest African-American student who excels at diverse things such as football and robotics, and works as a car mechanic in his spare time, and gets roped into this harebrained plot by some really stupid technicality that I can’t be bothered to remember right now. He is another one of those characters that, by virtue of being a mechanic, also magically gains the ability to build and fix literally anything with a circuit or a gear in it.

There’s literally nothing redeemable about this piece of crap. Even the soundtrack and score is incomprehensibly bad, and frequently sounds very inappropriate, as whoever was in charge of music for this film had a tendency to pick upbeat pseudo-80s electropop for extremely serious scenes about heist planning or whatever - and then pick generic indie rock for useless scenes of the main characters getting up in the morning and leaving their house. The low budget is also really obvious as when you can tell that the robotics/woodworking shop in their high school is pretty much the same room as the US Mint set.

Don’t really have a quippy ending for this post. This movie is just an enormous waste of time and I’m actually shocked Netflix made this crap.