Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with leads Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu. Liu sounded switched on and indeed nailed her role. The grab of Dustin Hoffman brokering a romance in the style of (Jewish, NYC) De Niro and Pacino also sounded fun. Daniel Roher directed a pro forma, predictable, just-roll-with-it script he wrote with Robert Ramsey (Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), Intolerable Cruelty (2003)).
The game is to smoodge a romance and a heist together via some kooky angle (think Relay (2024) and so on), here a hearing condition that allows Woodall to tune pianos and open safes. It's so very analog. He's a broken boy who, we're told, is virtuosic but refuses to play, so we know at least one thing that's going to happen. Unfathomably single Liu is gearing up for a make-or-break performance to conclude her time at music school. Herbie Hancock and Jean Reno cameo. Lior Raz runs the criminal track. He does what's asked of him but he and other minor characters are poorly drawn. Too much happens to Woodall all at once. Too often I did not believe this movie.
Perhaps the film is trying to observe that the current generation (of young men) has to thieve to get what the previous generation earnt, or maybe that the U.S.A. is now one big heist. Women can still find the meaning in the arts now denied to these men. At no time did anyone demonstrate the cool, calm and total mastery of James Caan. So much montage. The ending left the crypto and the romance unresolved though her career seemed to be panning out.
Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three stars. The ending is too abrupt. A Critic's Pick by Brandon Yu at the New York Times: Good Will Hunting (1997). I too got the Brad Pitt vibes from Woodall's puckered brow. "[T]he film does buckle under the weight of its many ideas."
