Masquerade is a movie where an active home invasion and burglary is happening from almost minute one, yet nothing is actually happening at all. It’d be charitable to call it a slow burn, but also an insult to artistic slow burn movies. I’m not even sure it’s trying to burn slowly so much as waste time in a movie that’s already only 80 minutes long. With almost five minutes of opening credits. You can see the theater director making stretch motions with his hands… gotta keep this up long enough to call it a theatrical release! Quick! To the “slowly removing art from its frame, rolling it up, and putting it into tubes” montage! The audiences will love it… what with all the removing art from frame, rolling it up, and putting it into tubes…

I didn’t much care for this movie.

Masquerade is about a home invasion. A young girl is home with her babysitter while her rich art dealer parents are at a masquerade party. Then a pair of crooks wearing fencing masks (I think) break in… hey wait… they are wearing masks too. It’s like… deep man. Anyhow, the parents are driven home by Bella Thorne who is in on the heist… and the daughter is hiding from the burglars.

This movie is absolutely fascinating in its apparently deliberate decision for nothing much to happen. There are, indeed, multiple scenes of the crooks just taking art off walls, rolling it, and putting it in tubes. There’s two scenes of one criminal slowly unrolling his bag of art-stealin’ tools and examining them… why? I don’t know… because it wastes screen time? The daughter hides and the movie spends endless minutes of one of the crooks just looking through rooms for her, while we know she’s up in the attic so the suspense is missing (despite the soundtrack’s valiant efforts to suggest otherwise).

Can we get something going please? Anything? Oh… finally… someone took a painting off the wall, is rolled it up, and put it in a tube. Thank god for the some action! Wooo!

And then we get an ending that I found very confusing. Maybe I’m stupid and need to spend more time taking art off walls, rolling it up, and putting it in a tube, but I didn’t follow what the “twist” was. Hell, with the last shot a morph, I thought they were saying this was really a twisty time travel movie. I’ll confess to being baffled and curious enough to rewind and rewatch… and I’m still not sure. I feel like a dummy. This dumb movie made me feel like a dummy. That’s hardly fair.

Avoid this turkey. If you’ve even heard of it. Unless you want lessons on how to steal art. If so, you first take the painting off the wall, remove it from the frame….

Score: 56