BEFORE: Another bank robbery film tonight, I've got about a week's worth of heist films to follow.
Linking from "Fun With Dick and Jane", Tea Leoni was also in "A League of Their Own" with Geena Davis (last seen in "Speechless").
THE PLOT: Three thieves successfully rob a New York City bank, but making the escape from the city proves to be almost impossible.
AFTER: To properly judge this film, it's necessary to break it down into two components: the heist, which is just plain brilliant, and the escape, which is just not. This feels like a half-written script, a classic case of a screenwriter painting himself into a corner, with no way out. It's a terrible dilemma, one seen in films where the heroes are less than noble, bank robbers in this case, but also need to garner the audience's sympathy. Make them too ruthless, or too lucky, and you lose the support of the crowd.
The solution here is to make their trip to the airport a nightmare - broken-down cars, muggers, a bus driver obsessed with the rules, and a city on the verge of madness. The city becomes the villain, more evil than any criminal, in the hopes that we'll sympathize with the anti-hero protagonists. But it's a shame that to do this, the movie had to fall back on every negative stereotype about New York. i.e. it's impossible to find the BQE, people spout random nonsense on the bus, cab drivers speak only Arabic, etc. etc.
New York City has come a long way in two decades - there are buses now that take you all the way to the airport, they don't drop you half a mile from sight of the terminal. Another example, many of our cab drivers now speak English fluently, and for some it's even their first language. Technology has been a big help too, with buses that take farecards and taxis that take credit cards. GPS devices in cabs and maps on EVERY phone also now make getting lost in Queens very, very unlikely.
Even if you take the technology of 1990 into consideration, though, the second half of this film is still a mess. Leaving town via the airport? That's the first place the police will check when they're looking for fugitives. Try the bus station, or better yet, the subway - criminals blend right in there. Or hop the PATH train to New Jersey - boom, right out of NY jurisdiction.
I found this great web-site, onthesetofnewyork.com - it shows photos of exact locations where films were shot in NYC, it came in very handy after watching "The Sitter". According to that site, the bank in this film is located at Park Ave. and East 40th St. It's a neighborhood I know very well, and I believe that there's still a bank on that corner, now it's a Citibank though. You can see the overpass that takes cars around Grand Central Terminal in a lot of the exterior shots. (It's the same place the heroes made their stand against the aliens in "The Avengers", and also was a key location in "I Am Legend")
I promised another tale from the NYC production frontlines, so here's one also set in 1990: I was about a year out of college, and I was working for that small company that made music videos and other short promos. One of the company's two directors had made the move to California, and I was doing office work for the other director, who was his ex-wife. He came back to shoot some station IDs for the Disney Channel, they looked a lot like the opening animation from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", I think the project was called "Quackertown". I didn't work on the shoot, but when it was over, I was hired to rent a truck and pick up the sets from the studio. A pretty basic job, but the main reason to get the sets out of the studio was to prevent the Disney company from taking possession of them - the director felt that if he had possession of the sets, then if Disney wanted to make more station IDs in a similar style, they'd have to hire him.
I didn't ask too many questions, maybe I should have, but I showed up, loaded the sets into a truck, and drove them to a self-storage facility in Brooklyn. The storage room was put in the director's name, with his California address, we bought a lock and mailed the director the key, and that was that. A few days later, I realized that I had never bothered to ask who the set pieces belonged to, and perhaps I'd been an accomplice in a theft of intellectual property. I hadn't yet learned the finer points of contract law, so who knows, perhaps the ownership of the sets wasn't all that clear. I did my job, got paid for the day, and tried to forget about it.
I don't know if the director ever got the sets out of storage, or if the Disney people threw a fit over losing the Quackertown sets, or if somebody somewhere lost their job over this. Maybe somebody didn't pay the storage charges, and the sets were auctioned off, who knows? But if I was involved in a heist, I've got to say it was pretty easy - the shooting studio was eager to get rid of the set pieces, since they were taking up so much space. We showed up with a truck, said we were there to collect the sets, and they just gave them to us. And that's how you steal stuff from Disney, I think. (They can't still prosecute me for this, can they?)
Also starring Bill Murray (last heard in "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties"), Randy Quaid (last seen in "Brokeback Mountain"), Jason Robards (last seen in "Divorce American Style"), Bob Elliott, with cameos from Phil Hartman, Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Game Change"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Easy A"), Victor Argo, Philip Bosco, Kurtwood Smith (last seen in "Cedar Rapids").
RATING: 4 out of 10 helium balloons
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