BEFORE: OK, Disney break over, back to movies about people stealing stuff and trying to kill each other. At least it's adult stuff I can relate with, not having any kids just makes it weird that I'm watching Disney movies. I got some funny looks when I went to the theater two years ago to see the "Minions" movie and I didn't have a kid with me, I guess I was giving off child molester vibes or something, and I usually try very hard not to do that. I wonder if child predators watch kids movies in their spare time, probably not. But still they have to stay current on what's popular, right?
Alan Tudyk carries over again from "Peter Pan & Wendy". And a great big accidental Birthday SHOUT-out to Jason Lee, born April 25, 1970.
THE PLOT: Ethan Tell is a small-time crook who makes a big-time score when he steals 1 million dollars. But his life changes radically for the worse when he discovers that stealing the money was the easy part.
AFTER: I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this movie made almost nothing at the box office. Weird name, no A-level stars and it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a crime film or a comedy, so it tried to be both. That hardly ever works. Well, the IMDB doesn't say how much the movie earned, so that's a clear sign that it bombed. The Wiki pages just says the film was released, but no comment about how it did.
I think it's safe to say that in a few months, I'll have completely forgotten about this one - it kind of feels like somebody made a crime movie without ever having seen one before, because there's little focus on the heist itself, which is the most important part of a crime film. Think about "Ocean's Eleven", 'The Italian Job", "Baby Driver", what makes them work, what's the engine that drives the car. It's planning the heist and pulling it off, watching IT happen even if everything doesn't go as planned. But this film is somehow about everything else, like trying to fake a broken arm to get out of doing the heist in the first place.
And then when things accidentally succeed, it's about what happens to the money AFTER the lead character serves three years in prison. Tell's wife shot him and took off as soon as she heard sirens - but were the cops even coming to their house, or were they just in the neighborhood for some other reason? We'll never know. Tell then stumbled out into the streets with the bag of money and we then see him waking up in the hospital. He says that the money got stolen from him, but his ex-partner and a couple of dirty cops don't believe him, so they all follow him around to see if he's got a stash somewhere.
But now he's an ex-convict, so that means reporting in to his parole officer, being aware of the fact that hanging out with criminals or being caught with a gun in his possession will send him back to prison. And he finds out his wife is now his ex-wife, and she's married another man so that she could raise Tell's son. Oh, yeah, Tell now has a son that she won't let him see, unless of course he's still got that million dollars stashed somewhere.
Based on the fact that he moves out of the halfway house and into a room above a church rectory, it sure seems like he doesn't have money hidden away somewhere. A priest hires him to clean out the apartment after the last caretaker committed suicide - he finds a safe there but has no idea how to open it, so he just sleeps with it in his bed, as if that will give him some kind of inspiration? That's a bit weird. I'm not a professional safecracker but if it were important to me to get into a safe, I'd at least do a little research about it, probably you only have to get so close to the right number, and if you've got some time, trying every possible combination isn't out of the question.
Then his ex-partner in crime (and ex-wife's brother) gets released, and he also wants to know where the money from the heist is. Like everyone else in this film, he beats or tortures Tell to try to find out, but then when this doesn't work they become partners (again) in another money-making scheme, but it's blackmail this time. I wanted to like these characters, but they kept doing more crime things and this made it very hard for me to root for them. From a filmmaking perspective, and pretty much any angle, it's just one bad idea after another.
Worse, they tried to do that "splash page" thing where they show us the most exciting part of the movie first, then the plot snaps back three years to show us the original crime, but then the whole movie, we kind of know where things are headed, so there's no real surprise when we finally get back there. I know why they put the most exciting bit first, but it's not really justified if that gives too much away.
Well at under 90 minutes at least it won't waste too much of your time. But if that's the best thing I can say about a movie, you probably realize it's not going to be worthwhile either, it's kind of right down the middle, not overly annoying but then there's not much to enjoy either, it's simply not going to be anybody's favorite movie, so then what exactly was someone trying to accomplish?
Also starring Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "Second Act"), Katee Sackhoff (last heard in "Batman: Year One"), Jason Lee (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "Babylon"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Faizon Love (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Oscar Nunez (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Peter Reinert (last seen in "Fanboys"), Monica Young, Joseph O'Neill, Gage Christopher, Frank Drank (last seen in "The Campaign"), Kenny Tarr, Cassandra Clark, Philip Cole.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bullet-ridden watermelons
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