Life of Crime

Year 13, Day 88 - 3/29/21 - Movie #3,791

BEFORE: Kevin Corrigan carries over from "The King of Staten Island", that's three in a row, and four appearances so far this year for him.  

Getting very close to the end of Women's History Month, nearly last call for famous birthdays - March 29 is the birthday of singer Pearl Bailey (born in 1918), author and childbirth activist Sheila Kitzinger (born in 1929), Brazilian singer-songwriter Astrud Gilberto (born in 1940), tennis player Jennifer Capriati (born in 1976), and actresses Marina Sirtis, Amy Sedaris, Lucy Lawless and Elle MacPherson, we celebrate them today. 

THE PLOT: Two common criminals get more than they bargained for after kidnapping the wife of a corrupt real-estate developer, who shows no interest in paying the $1 million ransom for her safe return. 

AFTER: This story's set in Detroit sometime in the 1970's, but they filmed it around Greenwich Connecticut in the 2010's - a bit of movie magic, I guess. Another one of those box-office bombs, though, it cost about $12 million to make but only grossed $265,000 in the U.S. and $1.4 million worldwide.  Some studio got a big tax write-off for this one, I bet.  It's a bit of a shame, though, that nobody saw this, but hey, maybe on cable or streaming it can find some kind of audience, maybe even a cult following, though it's kind of not weird enough for that. 

It's based on an Elmore Leonard novel titled "The Switch", and some of these characters turned up again in Leonard's book "Rum Punch", which got adapted by Tarantino into "Jackie Brown".  You may notice that Yasiin Bey's character's name is Ordell Robbie, and that's who Samuel L. Jackson played in "Jackie Brown", so this is sort of a half-prequel to that Tarantino film?  I think one or two other characters are in both stories, too.  I've seen the film versions "Get Shorty" and "Out of Sight", but it's been too long since I watched "Jackie Brown" - maybe it's time for a re-watch? 

What impressed me here is that Leonard wrote what starts out as a simple kidnapping story, and those are notorious for only ending two ways - either the ransom gets paid and the captive gets released, or the ransom gets paid and the captive gets killed.  Thankfully Leonard came up with a third possibilily, namely what if the ransom DIDN'T get paid, and the kidnappers picked the wrong couple, one that was sort of on the rocks and the husband was about to file for divorce anyway?  The husband not only doesn't want to pay the ransom, but it actually benefits him if his wife gets killed, because then he doesn't have to divide assets with her, or pay any alimony.  It's a neat little twist, and it takes the power away from the bad guys and gives it back to the husband - who is also sort of a bad guy, but more of the corrupt developer with a secret bank account, cheating-on-his-wife kind of character.  (You know the type, you maybe even voted for a guy like that...)

Some form of Stockholm Syndrome also comes into play here, because Mickey, the kidnapped wife, forms a connection with one of her captors, and maybe there's even a bit of a romantic spark there.  Who can blame her, since she just found out her husband's got a girl on the side, AND won't pay for her release?  Can this marriage be saved?  Probably not.  Then there's friction among the three kidnappers, because they've got different ideas about how to salvage this criminal operation, and also one of them's got a not-so-secret Nazi fetish and is probably a white supremacist.  Yeah, I'm not rooting for him, either, but the other two guys seem like pretty cool anti-heroes. 

Things get more complicated when Mickey's potential extramarital love interest, Marshall, makes his play for Mickey at the worst possible time, and things continue to get more complicated when Mickey's husband's girlfriend connects with the kidnappers and she wants in on the scheme, too.  It could be that she'd been working her own con on the same mark from a different angle all along, who knows?  But that's the world of Elmore Leonard, everybody's got an angle and everybody's chasing some prize and/or having an affair.  Maybe that's just the way people were in the 1970's, a bunch of swingers?  IDK, I was just a kid at the time.  I remember being forced to take tennis lessons, so the film gets that right - tennis was very big in the 1970's.  So were martinis, culottes and Nixon masks...

NITPICK POINT: I remember international phone calls being much more complicated than this - and more expensive, too.  I don't think I even knew that you COULD call another country back then without talking to an operator.  And wasn't it super expensive to do that back then?  Long distance rates were much higher, right?  How did the kidnappers afford to call the husband in the Bahamas?  They should have threatened to reverse the long-distance charges, that might have got him to pay the ransom, because it would have been cheaper!

Also starring Jennifer Aniston (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) (last seen in "Amy"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Greed"), Will Forte (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Mark Boone Junior (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), John Hawkes (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Clea Lewis (last seen in "Motherhood"), Charlie Tahan (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe"), Leonard Robinson, Kevin Porter Young, Alex Ladove, Jenna Nye, Jill Abramovitz, Seana Kofoed, Kofi Boakye, Chyna Layne, R. Marcos Taylor (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton") with archive footage of Demond Wilson. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 peepholes