BEFORE: My summer staycation is almost at an end, though I didn't really have four weeks of down time, or even two. I've stayed available for the odd theater shift here and there, and so even on the weeks where the place was 99% closed, twice there was one screening, and I worked it. Plus I managed to get a colonoscopy done and I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow, then the school year sort of starts again on Thursday with a morning staff meeting that I have to manage. Then next week I'll be busy busy with orientations and such - so the rest of August is pretty much going to fly by, and September will be here before I know it. So I'd better get started on figuring out what to watch after September 3 that will get me to October 1.
Robert Pattinson carries over again from "High Life".
THE PLOT: After a botched bank robbery lands his younger brother in prison, Connie Nikas embarks on a twisted odyssey through New York City's underworld to get his brother Nick out of jail.
AFTER: This is another one of those "What could possibly go wrong? Oh, right, everything." movies, from the directors of "Uncut Gems", which also fits that pattern. It starts with Connie Nikas, a small-time criminal pulling his mentally impaired brother, Nick, out of a court-ordered therapy session so they can go commit a bank robbery. Sure, there can't possibly be any negative effects from those things, right? Only of course there are. Honestly, it's a pretty well planned-out bank robbery, the brothers are wearing those full latex face-masks like in "Mission: Impossible", and they're wearing a lot of bulky layers so they can discard the outer ones and look completely different. The idea being that once they're a few blocks away from the bank, they won't look the same and the police will be looking for two different guys of a different race.
But Connie's not the briliiant criminal mastermind that he thinks he is, for starters the teller only has so much money available in her cash drawer, and it's less than they want. But rather than settle for less, Connie tells her to go in the back room and fill up the bag with more money, and once she's out of sight, of course she might take the opportunity to slip something else into the bag with the money. So right off the bat there are variables in play that Connie didn't count on or factor into the plan, so things go south. They do get stopped by the police because they're two guys walking down the street, away from the crime scene. But they'll be all right as long as Nick can hold it together and act cool - and he's running, isn't he? Damn, that looks pretty guilty.
So the chase is on, and a run through the New World mall in Queens ends in disaster, Nick jumps through a plate of glass and gets injured, and then arrested. He's taken to Riker's Island, which all of us New Yorkers know is probably the worst possible place to be, and for someone with cognitive impairment, no doubt it's even worse. So while Nick is fighting with other inmates, Connie is trying to clean the red dye off the stolen money and using it to pay Nick's bail bond, but he's still coming up $10,000 short. What does he need to do, rob another bank? Sure, there's that, but instead he hits up his older girlfriend for a cash advance on her credit card. The bail bonds guy keeps saying it's a loan and she'll "get it back", but I'm guessing that's probably not how that all works.
Connie figures out from hearing one side of a phone conversation that his brother's been taken to a hospital, most likely Elmhurst Hospital, also in Queens. (This is a very Queens-centric movie, and I'm here for it...). So Connie takes the subway to Elmhurst and sneaks into the hospital in order to bust his brother out. Through a little more investigation and some conversations with strangers, he figures out the right floor and sure, enough, there's a patient being guarded by a cop, with his face all bandaged up. So Connie loads his groggy brother into a wheelchair and cons the access-a-ride driver to take them home.
Only they don't go home, Connie just backtracks to the previous stop that the ambulance made, and persuades the people who live there that he's an honest guy with good intentions and he just needs a place for him and his brother to hang out until they can arrange a ride home. After a few frantic phone calls and an impromptu make-out session with a 16-year old girl to keep her from seeing his face on the news, Connie has to deal with his brother waking up from the sedatives, only, get this, it's not his brother at all, it's another inmate with a similar build who also had his face bandaged up, but for different reasons. So Connie tried to do everything right, only he ended up sneaking the wrong guy out of the hospital, and now he has to figure out how to get THIS guy back and get his brother out.
But first he has to listen to THIS guy's story, about getting out on parole and getting drunk and hooking up with his old gang of drug dealers and selling acid at an arcade and stashing a Sprite bottle full of drugs in the Haunted House at an amusement park, and then taking an Uber and jumping out and turning his face into road pizza. But somewhere in there, Connie starts to figure out a plan to get those stashed drugs and work with Ray to sell them and thus also raise the other $10,000 he needs for his brother's bail, so it all sounds crazy but it JUST might work, assuming everyone is honest and doesn't betray each other and a few other things go his way, but honestly, come on, what are the odds of THAT happening in THIS movie?
The Safdie brothers really know Queens here, and well, they should, it's where they grew up. I've had some nights in the last year where I got out of the theater at midnight or 1 am and still had to get home, and while nothing this crazy happened to me, I can sort of see how it's possible. NYC is a completely different world after midnight, in those wild hours before the sun comes back up, so I've found myself at different spots like Jay St. in downtown Brooklyn at 1 am, looking for the right bus stop that's going to get me home, and it's kind of comforting to know that if was hungry at that point, well, there were taco stands in the area that were open and crowded. Sure, it's a dangerous place to be, maybe, but at least there are tacos.
I have to call a NITPICK POINT, though: Adventureland is out in Farmingdale on Long Island, it's about 25 miles from the heart of Queens, so somehow I don't see how all this happening in one night is even possible. It could be an hour and a half drive out to Farmingdale, except who knows, maybe at 3 am it would be faster. Maybe another NP would be that's there's no follow-up with Caliph, did he get his Sprite bottle back?
All right, that's going to wrap-up my little trilogy of films where Robert Pattinson plays a criminal or convict who is either impaired or confused and continues to make bad life choices. Bank robber twice, in jail twice, endangered his brother twice, anyway it's an interesting group of films if nothing else. And there's really only one path out of here, so I'm going to take it, and it should lead me to "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" by Friday.
Also starring Benny Safdie (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Buddy Duress (last seen in "Person to Person"), Taliah Lennice Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh (last heard in "Sid & Judy"), Barkhad Abdi (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Necro, Peter Verby, Saida Mansoor, Gladys Mathon, Rose Gregorio (last seen in "True Confessions"), Eric Paykert, Astrid Corrales, Rachel Black (last seen in "The Bourne Legacy"), Hirakish Ranasaki, Maynard Nicholl, Ben Edelman, Laurence Blum (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Jason Harvey, Robert Clohessy (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Eloisa Santos, Bryan Seslow, Craig muMs Grant (last seen in "Side Effects"), George Lee Miles (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Kate Halpern, Christopher Kirk, Leticia Ortega, Souleymane Sy Savane (last seen in "Barry"), Mahadeo Shivraj (last seen in "The Smurfs"), Dorothi Fox (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Ratmesh Dubey (last seen in "The Report"), Tessa O'Connor, Jim Handley, Cliff Moylan (last seen in "The Irishman"), Evonne Walton, Jim Dzurenda, Roy James Wilson (last seen in "Split"), Brendan M. Burke, Jordan Valdez, Laura Sledge, Jerome Frazier, Javaughn Swindell, Dion McBean, Sean Miller, Benny DeVincenzi, Daniel Chung. with cameos from Lewis Dodley (last seen in "The Burnt Orange Heresy"), Tara Lynn Wagner.
RATING: 5 out of 10 mall cops
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