BEFORE: Just two movies this week, and I want to get just a LITTLE closer to Christmas before I watch the next movie after this. You get it, right? But it works out great because I'm going to have three very long shifts over the next 4 days, I don't know when or how I'm going to sleep, but I suppose I'll figure that out. And sleeping is actually more important than watching movies, it turns out. There's a lot of coffee needed to make this week possible, but then when it wears off I'm probably going to crash real hard. See you on the other side.
Mel Gibson carries over from "On the Line".
THE PLOT: After escaping from a Michigan prison, a career criminal assumes a new identity in Canada and goes on to rob a record 59 banks and jewelry stores while being hunted by a police task force. Based on the story of the Flying Bandit.
AFTER: This film is based on the true story of an American who moved to Canada and robbed almost 60 banks over a few years, due to the fact that nobody in Canada ever saw the need to have armed guards in every bank. Even after this man, who went by the name of Robert Whiteman for many years, robbed many banks successfully, this was NOT enough motivation to hire proper security for every bank in Canada, that just wasn't seen as a proper use of bank resources, hiring thousands of security guards across the country. Who knows, maybe when you factor in the guards' salaries, plus health care, pension, disability pay, sick leave, workers compensation, and paid leave, perhaps it was cheaper to just let this guy rob a bank or two a month. Who's to say?
His real name wasn't Robert Whiteman at all, it was Gilbert Galvan Jr. when he lived in America, but then when he broke out of prison and headed up to Canada, he couldn't get a job selling ice cream unless he had a Canadian I.D., so he paid a homeless guy $22 (Canadian) for his I.D. The movie at this point tells us, "This really happened." but I'm not so sure about this part of the story. For one thing, isn't it much too cold up in Canada to eat ice cream, and also, that's a thing that happy people do, and I'm not sure Canadians are capable of feeling things like joy and happiness. I could be wrong, though.
Whiteman's small business dreams are crushed, however, when the ice cream business decides to focus on sales made by truck, rather than those little bicycle carts. So Whiteman has to teach himself to rob banks, because it's not like he can get a driver's license for an ice cream truck, that would be ridiculous. Also he can't possibly become a carpenter, electrician, painter, postal worker, car salesman, office worker, grocery store worker, pizza delivery guy, bank teller, news reporter, movie theater usher, librarian, bartender, waiter, limo driver, radio DJ, furniture salesman, insurance broker, shoe salesman, baker, barista, hospital orderly, bricklayer, furniture mover, baggage handler, barber, cashier, florist, gardener, plumber, grave-digger, mechanic, photographer, farmer, doorman, lifeguard, fisherman or tour guide, now could he? Nope, it's either selling ice cream by bicycle or robbing banks, those would appear to be his only two options, because it's the 1980's and Reaganomics are in play and all that.
Maybe he should have just gone to work for a different ice cream bicycle cart company, or maybe he could have opened his own ice cream business, oh, but to do that he'd have to have money, and we're back at the same problem. OK, robbing banks is it, I guess. He does one robbery and gets a feel for it, he likes it AND he's kind of good at it, except he forgets to bring a bag to put the money in. No worries, this is Canada so they just give you the money bag they have lying around and then they help you stuff the money in AND zip it up for you. They're very nice people, these Canadians, maybe a bit simple, and they can't feel happiness, but otherwise they seem OK.
The last time I was in Canada, my wife and I went to Niagara Falls and then drove through Ontario for a bit, I went to a beer festival in Hamilton that for some reason had a rock-climbing wall, probably a bad thing to have at a beer festival in retrospect. I remember also getting ripped off for orange juice in a Denny's, they asked us if we wanted juice when we sat down, then brought us a whole pitcher, and honestly I was thinking about a glass, I don't love OJ enough to want a whole pitcher. Then we saw that glasses of juice were FREE with every breakfast combo, so we could have just waited and had that, but instead we were charged about $18 for the pitcher we didn't really want. I was mad until I remembered that was 18 Canadian dollars, and that's not even real money, so who cares?
Anyway, Whiteman starts doing really well for himself, and decides to visit other Canadian provinces and pull his little bank robber act, then fly back to Ontario because nobody in Canada before him had ever considered leaving a city right after committing a crime, I guess most Canadian criminals wouldn't dream of doing that, instead they just stand outside the crime scene and wait for the RCMP to arrest them - well that would be the decent thing to do, I suppose. Flying out of town to escape the law probably feels like cheating to them, like it just wouldn't be sporting. But as an American he probably knew that after a bank robbery the best thing to do is get out of town, fast.
It's strange that there are two schools of thought about this - the natural human instinct is to choose flight over fight, run away as soon as you've done something wrong, it just makes sense to the lizard brain. Ah, but only guilty people run away, and if police see you running they could immediately know the score. It takes a smart man to WALK away from the crime, because then you just look like a guy walking down the street. I remember a lot of kids in high school getting in trouble for leaving school early by trying to sneak out by the gym, which was close to the parking lot. Well, forget it because the gym teacher will catch you, and now you've got detention. If I had a study hall for last period, I used to walk out right by the office and wave to the secretaries as I left. Now, I had a reputation as a straight-A student, so they never stopped me, not once, because I walked out and didn't try to run or sneak out, plus they figured if I was leaving early I probably had a darn good reason.
That's the whole theory here in the depiction of Whiteman's robberies - he'd put on a fake nose or a weird wig or wear something notable like a construction worker's vest, and then ditch that right after the crime, change into a business suit, and WALK away from the bank, because he wanted to look like he had nothing to hide, and a guilty person wouldn't walk, they'd run. Plus, the cops were looking for that construction worker with the big nose and the long hair, and well, that wasn't him, not any more.
Right now law enforcement has been looking for the person who killed a health insurance CEO in New York, and it seems that he was able to get away from the scene by taking a bicycle through Central Park, where he ditched his backpack, then took a taxi from the Upper West Side to a bus terminal in the Bronx, and from there he got on a bus and headed out to Pennsylvania, and I'm guessing it was all done at normal human "nothing to see here" speed. That's how you do it, really. I also recall those prison inmates who busted out in upstate New York a few years back and most people figured they would head for Canada, which was RIGHT there, only that was just a little too obvious. Nobody was, for example, expecting them to head south and try to make it to Mexico, but if they had, they might have been more successful. Just saying.
In the meantime, since it was the 1980's, the airlines had just come up with this thing called frequent flyer miles, or maybe they were called "loyalty programs" back then, before SkyMiles or AdvantageMiles or whatever. They knew you had a choice of airlines, and they wanted to thank you for your loyalty, so if you made enough trips on one airline, they tracked that and then they gave you gold or diamond or platinum medallion status. If you reached 100,000 miles then I think you got to bang a stewardess, remember that it was a different time.
Whiteman had been in a relationship, however, with a woman who ran the hostel or shelter or whatever he first stayed when he reached Ottawa. He left her for a while back when he couldn't figure out if he really wanted to rob banks or sell ice cream for the rest of his life, and remember those were the ONLY two choices available to him, so he was relieved when he learned that he COULD rob banks and therefore he could support this beautiful woman that was way out of his league and he didn't deserve at all. Whew, what a relief, and it's not like it's going to be really awkward when she finds out about the bank robberies, he just told her his father got him a job in Vancouver and he's got to fly there every couple of weeks to help analyze business security systems, which is kind of true, if you think of that as a euphemism for "casing a bank". And he's got to fly back and forth because they haven't invented camera phones yet - yep, this alibi is totally believable, it's just not very true.
Not-Whiteman gets financed by a gangster named Tommy Kay in exchange for a cut of the haul from each bank robbery, and the average heist nets him about $20,000 - but again, remember that's Canadian dollars, so it doesn't really go as far as you might think, since their money's not even real. But the bad news is that there's a law enforcement task force trying to take Tommy Kay down, and they track everyone who comes and goes in and out of Tommy's club, so eventually the task force sets their eyes on Galvin/Whiteman, because they've got a feeling that he's up to something more than collecting a lot of air miles.
Kay convinces Whiteman to stop robbing small banks with small payouts, and go for a bigger heist, something called "The Big Vancouver", which involves robbing a jewelry store. It's an elaborate scheme, and though Robby is used to working alone, he teams up with one of Tommy's guys for the jewelery theft, and they almost get caught by the task force. They only escape because Whiteman had the brilliant idea to hire a bunch of out-of-work actors to dress identically to the robbers and walk around the mail in pairs, so that the Task Force won't know which pair to track. And Robby trained them all to walk away, not run.
It was a great idea to cast Josh Duhamel, because he's a charming, attractive guy (jeez, I'm straight and I'd switch...) and so we like Robby and we want him to succeed. We see a glimpse of the real Gilbert Galvan at the end of the movie, and he's nowhere near as attractive as Duhamel. Maybe Galvan was 1980's attractive, but damn, Josh Duhamel looks like he was synthetically grown in a handsome lab or something.
Eventually, the money from Galvan's robberies is all gone, because he made the mistake of buying bigger and bigger houses with it, to keep impressing his wife. Did he not sell the smaller houses when he bought the bigger ones? I guess even in the 1980's, with a booming economy and Reaganomics working/not working, even a bank robber couldn't get ahead - eventually after a few years of paying that mortgage, that safe full of money wasn't so full any more. And remember, once again, he simply COULD NOT get a regular job for some reason that I forget or was never mentioned. So even though he KNEW the task force was looking for him, he had to start robbing banks again, as Willie Sutton said, "Because that's where the money is."
But the ride had to come to an end at some point - it was only a matter of time before somebody in Canada learned how to put an exploding dye pack into one of the money bags. Or the task force would finally have some evidence against Whiteman, like if he left behind a stray fingerprint or something. The important thing to know about working ANY job, even a bank robbing one, is to know when to call it quits. Whiteman kept saying, "This will be the last job." followed by "No, THIS one will be the last job." Well, guess what, you probably don't get to decide that, and the task force might have something to say about it, too. Still, maybe it's best to know when to say "When."
Also starring Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Shotgun Wedding"), Elisha Cuthbert (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Nestor Carbonell (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Swen Temmel (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Keith Arthur Bolden (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Michael H. Cole (ditto), Dylan Flashner (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Olivia d'Abo (last heard in "Tarzan & Jane"), Claire Bronson (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Eric J. Little, Jessica Luza (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Rachael Markarian (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Leander Suleiman (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Ian Hoch (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Lorenzo Yearby, Chiara D'Ambrosio, Jacobi Hollingshed, Jason Vail (last seen in "Tammy"), Cooper Thornton (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Todd d'Amour (last seen in "C'mon C'mon"), Christina Bach (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Leslie Stratton, Dayna Beilenson (last seen in "Secret Headquarters"), Jerry Ascione (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), B.J. Winfrey, Greg Corbett (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Megan Hayes (last seen in "Zola"), Charlie Sara, Ashley Doughterty, Hannah Celeste, Packer Morley, Faisal Mahmood, Derek Severson, Clayton Landey (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Burns Burns (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Spence Maughon (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Sherilan Lane, Haley Webb (last seen in "Blonde"), Mary DeMatteo with archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Boy George (last seen in "Wham!").
RATING: 6 out of 10 music videos (in the early days of MTV)
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