If the new century brings an end to any genre of movie, I pray it’s the type we’ll call ‘don’t believe your eyes’ thrillers. The Usual Suspects, Wild Things, and now Best Laid Plans are each built on a foundation of lies—by the time the ultimate truth is revealed, after endless stultifying plot twists, the story has invalidated itself. Can a riddle ever truly satisfy as entertainment?
Wait: I also hope that 2000 kills the ‘heist gone wrong’ movie. A young filmmaker could be no more innovative than to write and direct a screenplay in which characters plan a robbery, execute it with panache, and live to tell the tale. In Best Laid Plans, more than one heist goes wrong, and guessing who’s deceiving whom becomes a sort of parlor game. In other words, Ted Griffin’s screenplay crossbreeds two annoying trends of the post-Tarantino independents.
Do yourself a favour and skip all synopses of Best Laid Plans except for this one—the cads at Fox give away far too much on the DVD box, for example, and there are, admittedly, superficial pleasures to be derived from Griffin’s bendy narrative if you know as little about it as possible. We meet college buddies Nick (Nivola) and Bryce (Brolin) as they catch up on old times in a stylish bar. They are both distracted by the entrance of a beautiful woman (Witerspoon). Fade out.
Fade in. A flustered Bryce calls Nick to his opulent pad in the wee hours of the AM. It seems after his girlfriend called Nick home, Bryce got friendly with Mystery Woman at the bar, and took her back to his place. The situation between them got hot and heavy. Post-coitus, she accused him of rape, and he found out that she’s only sixteen; his reputation on the line, Bryce bound her, gagged her, and is looking to Nick for advice on the next best move. That’s all I’m saying.
Griffin is a crafty writer, but Best Laid Plans doesn’t have the go-for-broke mentality of his Ravenous—it’s a logic puzzle void of visceral charge. Even moments when its protagonists reveal their human sides have a transparency to them—it’s the boy who cried wolf syndrome: why invest any emotion in these people when it’s likely part of a deception, anyway? (Though Best Laid Plans does not suffer in this regard nearly as much as Wild Things.) Themes of jealousy and class struggle, not to mention a soulful performance by Witherspoon, are buried under the weight of clever.
Welcome to Tropico, a gray little town stuck smack dab in the middle of nowhere where nothing ever happens--until a botched robbery leaves Nick (Aless...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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