BEFORE: OK, I might have spoke a little too soon when I said I had the path to Christmas all worked out. I did what I call a "walk-through" of the films for the rest of the year - that's when I go on IMDB and move from one film to the next using the actors' pages as the links. What, doesn't everyone plan out their movies for the next four months? Just me? Anyway, I got to mid-October and found a break in the chain, it turns out that Alia Shawkat is NOT in a film called "Life After Beth", I guess she was at one point but the IMDB page for that credit now says "Scenes Deleted", a phrase I just hate to see. So my chain was going to fall apart in the middle of the horror films, well I guess I'd rather learn about that now then find out at the last minute.
So, time to circle the wagons and scrap that plan, try to come up with a new one. Or maybe not, maybe I could fix it, since there's so much overlap between the various horror films, and I've got those appearances color-coded so I can spot them right away. Maybe this problem just called for some quick surgery, get in, cut out the bad links, and either try to stitch the hole back up (it's happened before with the Doc Block, often quite naturally, if I remove a film the ones on either side might just connect) or put in some other films, like an implant of sorts to fill the gap? Well, stranger things have happened, I suppose. I ended up removing four films (really, there was another potential break coming because IMDB doesn't confirm that Garry Marshall's voice is heard in "Hocus Pocus 2". (These are quality problems, I assure you...). Suddenly my chain of 25 horror films became a chain of 21 with a serious hole in the middle.
Cutting back to the next film on either side with a green link to another horror film - what else could close that gap? Could I keep the same entry point for September 30 and the same exit point for October 31, because that would be the best possible outcome. Well, sure, I found it, though I also had to reshuffle the deck a little, turn a group of five films around the other way, and I stuck some other horror films I was saving for next year (or the year after) in to close the gap. And, what luck, it turned out to be FOUR other films that closed the gap, so I don't have to change my counts in any other month. So it looks like I'll be watching that hot new vampire film "Sinners" sooner than I planned, and the "Hocus Pocus" films get tabled for another year. Those are the breaks.
Two of the just-added horror films star an actor named Gralen Bryant Banks, and by coincidence he is in TODAY'S film also, and it's also his birthday, so a big SHOUT-out to Mr. Banks tonight. He'll probably never know that his acting roles just totally saved my horror chain from collapsing, and therefore he's saved Movie Year 17 as well. Thank you, Mr. Banks, born August 17, 1961, good tidings and here's to your health. He's popped up four times already this year, in the movies "Brothers", "The Burial", "The Lovebirds" and "Five Nights at Freddy's". Tonight makes five, and he'll be around for a couple more days, and then I'll see him again in October, not too shabby. He could end up with as many appearances for the year as Samuel L. Jackson and Elvis Presley.
Glen Powell carries over from "Twisters" - I don't know what happened, I feel like there were a ton of Glen Powell films on my list, and I was going to make a whole chain out of them someday. But now I look again and I only see two left and one's a romance, so I've got to move on. Hey, Glen Powell might be a big star these days, but he's no Gralen Bryant Banks. Me, I'm just happy to have a confirmed path to Christmas again, it's now just 82 films away.
THE PLOT: A professor moonlighting as a hit man of sorts for his city police department descends into dangerous, dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to a woman who enlists his services.
AFTER: The premise here is that a rather ordinary college professor - albeit a very smart one, who teaches philosophy and such - would also dabble in electronics, being an expert in such things as microphones and cameras. He therefore gets hired by the New Orleans police to help with their surveillance efforts to convict a specific kind of criminal, those that would hire a hit-man to kill an enemy or a business partner or a spouse. Convicting such a person at the hit-man hiring stage would thus prevent a murder from taking place, saving a life, and not being an expert in these matters, I don't know if police departments are so forward-thinking when it comes to crime prevention. Maybe this is part of that "broken windows" philosophy, if you can identify a problem in a neighborhood before it gets out of hand, you can control the situation, and I can imagine the N.O.P.D. wanting to keep the murder rate down, because a high one would be bad for tourism. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean this is the way cops operate. I think mostly cops just wait for a crime to be reported, and then they head out to the scene. This kind of feels like entrapment, but if they can prove intent to hire a killer and money changes hands, I guess a lesser crime has been committed.
When the usual undercover guy who pretends to be the hit-man gets put on suspension, naturally the cops turn to their surveillance guy to step in. Yeah, gotta call B.S. on this, because as he points out, he's not qualified, he's a temp civilian tech working for them, they can't put him in harm's way, and meeting with a person capable of hiring a contract killer is potentially dangerous. So you kind of have to suspend disbelief in a big way, because I think in the real world this wouldn't happen, the cops would either send in a real trained U.C. or call the operation off if they were THAT short-handed.
Either way, Gary turns out to be really good at thinking like a killer, saying what a killer might say, and at least pretending like he's very good at killing people and disposing of the bodies. What he's not good at is remaining anonymous, so you know, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there? There are scenes midway through the film of Gary appearing in court to testify against the people who were trying to hire his non-existent hit-man character, and they say his name in open court, plus he's sitting RIGHT THERE. What's to prevent someone who gets convicted of hiring a killer of serving their time, getting out and then looking up Gary Johnson? Or bumping into him on the street and exacting their revenge? Shouldn't the identity of an undercover (non-)cop be kept secret from the criminals? Like, isn't that the whole point? Once an undercover cop appears in court to testify, doesn't that affect his ability to work undercover? (Yes, I watch a lot of "Law & Order", and the real crime is that I have to watch the new season of "Organized Crime" streaming on Peacock - why can't they air it on NBC during the summer, when TV is mostly reruns anyway?)
Gary reacts differently when the person trying to hire him is Madison, a beautiful woman who's possibly being abused by her husband, and she feels the only way she'll be free is to hire a hit-man. Well, these sure seem like extenuating circumstances, and if she fears for her life, maybe they should do something about THAT - don't they have an SVU squad in New Orleans? Gary might be right to turn down the job and tell her to use the money to get clear of her husband and disappear - but he get nothing but grief from the cops, because they would rather arrest the woman for trying to have her husband killed. NO NO NO, they should be following up by investigating the husband and/or putting this woman in protective custody, because if they did arrest her, what do you think her husband would do when he finds out what his wife got arrested for? He'd probably try to harm her or kill her just to cover up his history of abuse. So the cops are wrong here, and I'm on Team Gary.
Gary keeps working on these cases, and kind of takes things to the extremes, developing complex back-stories and using accents and wearing different costumes, trying to tailor his personality to be whatever he thinks the client needs him to be. This may be a great acting showcase for Glen Powell, like it's good stuff for the demo reel, but is this realistic? My guess is that it's not, but somehow this is a comic romantic crime film at the end of the day, so being believable kind of takes a back burner. Madison contacts him later and they meet at a dog rescue event, she tells Gary that she took his advice, got clear of her abusive husband, and is now getting a divorce. Deep down something tells her there's more to Gary than meets the eye, like how many contract killers enjoy teaching sports to kids and supporting rescue dogs? She can't quite put the pieces together, though.
They fall into a relationship, and treat her new house as a safe place, where they can both be free of whatever else is going on in their complicated lives. They go out on dates, and Gary even teaches Madison how to handle a gun. (Again, W.C.P.G.W.?). Well, it turns out that she might have been exaggerating a bit about the divorce, and of course she doesn't know anything about "Ron's" other life as Gary. There's some psychological meaning to all of this, like from Gary's philosophy class he probably said something about becoming the person you want to be, or reality being subjective or morality being fluid over time, but honestly this is all very muddled, it's still wrong to kill people, it's probably also wrong to pretend to be the type of person who kills people, and therefore it's probably pretty wrong to lead a woman to think that killing people is a viable solution to her problems. Yeah, but that's where we find ourselves at the end of a very complicated identity crisis.
This could be an enjoyable film, but it kind of requires not thinking too much about how far-fetched it is. That's weird that it's based on a true story, but obviously the screenwriters must have changed a lot.
Directed by Richard Linklater (director of "A Scanner Darkly" and "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood")
Also starring Adria Arjona (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Austin Amelio (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!"), Retta (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Sanjay Rao, Molly Bernard (last seen in "Otherhood"), Evan Holtzman (last seen in "Civil War"), Gralen Bryant Banks (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Mike Markoff, Bryant Carroll (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Enrique Bush, Bri Myles, Kate Adair (last seen in "Focus"), Martin Bats Bradford (last seen in "The Dirt"), Morgana Shaw (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Geostorm"), Richard Robichaux (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Jo-Ann Robinson (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Jordan Salloum (ditto), Jonas Lerway, Kim Baptiste, Sara Osi Scott, Anthony Michael Frederick (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Duffy Austin, Jordan Joseph, Garrison Allen, Beth Bartley, John Raley, Tre Styles (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Donna Duplantier (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Michele Jang, Stephanie Hong, Joel Griffin, KC Simms, Murphee Bloom, Roxy Rivera (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large").
RATING: 6 out of 10 video games used as currency
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