Lookout, The
© A.J. Malouin 2008
(Rating: 9 by Al)
(See our side page “How Caryl & Al Rate Movies.”)
(2007/USA. Directed by Scott Frank.)
Any time Al’s stomach starts churning, he knows he’s in the middle of either a good movie or a bad Coney. With no food in site and only “The Lookout” to look at, Al knew that, in seeing “The Lookout,” he was in the middle of a good yarn. Of course, the yarn wuz woven into a script full of implausibilities and short-comings, but the churning stomach said to Al, nevertheless, “Good Entertainment!”
The source of the churn was concern over how our hero (who is recruited to be The Lookout for a gang of bank robbers) is gonna get himself out of the jam into which he has mumbled himself.
If only our hero, Chris Pratt, could listen to Nancy Reagan as intensely as Ronald Reagan did! “Just say ‘No!’” we want to scream at Pratt when the gang, whom Pratt has known for three weeks, asks Pratt to throw in with them.
Chris Pratt is a severe head-injury case and (we are told) a former especially violent All-State high-school (ice) hockey player. Neither of these is enough, however, to explain nor justify his pratfall into this short-lived life of crime.
After his head injury, inflicted in an ill-considered car accident, Pratt is reduced to being a janitor at a bank (fatal job offer!!!)
He also has to write even the simplest of daily tasks in a notebook (“make the coffee!”) so he will not forget to do them.
Pratt has dreams of one day being a Bank Teller but his head-injury status makes the Bank Manager leery of giving Pratt that much added responsibility.
Knowing Pratt’s history as a popular athlete, Gary Spargo, head of the bank robbers, induces Pratt to join them, using an insidious line of conversational reasoning delivered in the basement of a Kansas farmhouse.
“You were The Best, dude.”
“You want your old life back, don’t you?”
“Well, you can get it. Because whoever has the money…has The Power!”
The money, gobs and gobs of it, will of course come from robbing the bank at which Pratt works. This small bank in rural farmland Kansas is once a year stuffed to the gills with cash, in order to pay the farmers for their harvested crops. That is the precise time at which the robbers intend to strike.
To share in this life-changing payday, all Chris Pratt has to do is stay in the front part of the bank and tell the safe-drilling gang out back when the deputy sheriff’s car is approaching on his nightly patrol of the bank.
The stomach-churning starts right at the start of the movie, with Pratt driving the car that will result in his head injury. In spite of the incredibly beautiful way this scene is filmed, we know something ugly is going to happen.
The stomach-churning continues as we watch the post-accident Pratt try to master the sequence of normal daily tasks that the rest of us don’t even have to think about as we perform them.
For Chris, everything has to be written in his notebook, or he will simply forget to do it.
The stomach-churning really becomes intense as Chris spirals into involvement with the gang of bank robbers. How will he avoid them? How will he get out of the plan? How will he survive the bank robbery? From beginning to end, there are a lot of evenly spaced nail-biting moments.
As mentioned, however, there are a lot of implausibilities and short-comings in the script.
They start with the accident itself. A stalled combine harvesting machine has been left all night long in the middle of a two-lane highway. Why would that be? Why wouldn’t it have been taken off the highway?
Another contrivance is Pratt’s roommate, Louis, telling Pratt how to solve problems. Out of the blue, Louis tells Pratt that Pratt’s brain doesn’t work normally. To solve a problem, Louis says, start at the end and work backward to the beginning.
This MAY be physically correct for a head-injury case, but the conversation explaining it sticks out like a sore thumb—until Pratt dramatically uses that technique later in his bank-robbery career. At that point, the earlier scripting which didn’t make sense at all suddenly makes sense. Sorta.
We feel, however, as if we have been served cheap beer.
The way Pratt gets off the hook and avoids going to jail for the bank robbery seemed to most of us to be the stuff of pretty cheap artifice, as well.
The way Pratt changes his mind about his level of participation in the robbery seems implausible, also. Pratt’s attitude changes for no reason that we are shown. We KNOW of course his attitude will change. The scriptwriter seems to know that we know it will change— and therefore the script doesn’t have to explain Pratt’s flip-flop. (You should pardon the expression.)
Early in the movie, when Pratt meets with his Case Worker, he tries to hit on her. She says she would like to, but it’s not a good idea. She then says that he should do something about his love life— and disappears forever from the movie. It’s a clumsy scene put there to suggest that Pratt is romantically vulnerable. When the gang comes along, we can see why the clumsiness was inserted.
The story limps through a mine field of these and other incongruities. All in all, though, “The Lookout” delivers a satisfying evening of entertainment.
Jeff Daniels does a very nice job playing Louis, Pratt’s blind roommate. As if in compensation for his blindness, Louis has been given the wisdom of Solomon in helping Chris deal with his ailment. It’s a puzzlement, of course, how Louis, a man who cannot see the mayonnaise, and Chris Pratt, a man who cannot remember where the mayonnaise is, could seriously be planning to open and run a restaurant together.
(That they have chosen to call their diner “Lou’s Your Lunch” indicates that they may not be serious about the chances for its success.)
The bank robber known as “Bone” is a chilling character, a sort of Johnny Cash without the black clothes, but with a very bad attitude. Bone looks as if he would kill you for no reason at all, by means of his long hair, dark glasses, and ubiquitous shotgun.
The entire show is stolen, however, by Matthew Goode, who plays Gary Spargo. Goode is a conniving, convincing study in the psychology of the criminal mind. He is suave, also, and as sophisticated beyond compare out there in the Kansas farmland.
The imaginary town of Noah, Kansas, outside of Kansas City, is very lovely character, as well. We feel the sweep of The Great Plains, the spareness of landscape and opportunity, and the cold winds blowing at our backs. In this movie, Noah, Kansas, truly feels like a landscape in which desperate acts could be hatched and executed. That the filmmakers would take us there and tell this story is a two-pronged decision that makes for great entertainment.
(1 hr. 38. Rated R in the USA for language, some violence and sexual content. With Alex Borstein as Mrs. Lange, Jeff Daniels as Lewis, Sergio Di Zio as Deputy Ted, Greg Dunham as Bone, Isla Fisher as Luvlee Lemons, Matthew Goode as Gary Spargo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Chris Pratt, David Huband as Mr. Tuttle, Bruce McGill as Robert Pratt, and several other actors in nice supporting roles.)