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Hockey’s Just Not That Big in Kansas
By bukkhead | October 4, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘THE LOOKOUT’
Written and Directed by Scott Frank
Rated R
99 mins.
Sometimes when a movie disapoints it’s your own fault. You go in with an unrealistic or unfair expectation. This is almost impossible to avoid, however, and so either movie makers or movie watchers have to live with it. Nevertheless, this can make it difficult to be objective—so it’s only fair to tell you that The Lookout might be a better movie than I am going to give it credit for.
Chris Pratt is a janitor at a small bank in a small town in Kansas. He’s an ex hockey all-star, suffering from brain damage due to a car accident when he was in high school. As he deals with, still four years later , the frustration of memory loss and the remorse of causing the accident, he winds up befriended by Gary, a ne’er do well who wants Chris to help his gang rob the bank. Rounding out the film are Chris’s roommate Lewis, a blind man who wants to open a restaurant someday, and Chris’s parents, who are wealthy and pay for Chris to live without encouraging him to make more of his life.
Typical plot, really, and not the reason to see the film. You know, more or less, what’s going to happen all along the way. And so you’re not too surprised, or moved, when Luvlee Lemons, an ex-stripper, goes to bed with Chris as part of the overall seduction. Gary gives speech about money and power and corporations, Lewis gives a speech about making mistakes when you should know better, but no one does anything you haven’t seen in a movie like this a hundred times before.
Personally, I rented The Lookout because I was so impressed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt with his performance in Brick. And as Chris, he does another excellent job with the role he’s given. He has a subtle hand portraying emotion, and displays the anger and shame of his new life without going over the top. Indeed, the entire cast was expertly directed, and I’m more than a little surprised that auteur Scott Frank brought such strong skills to the chair—usually when a director has also written the film, he’s got so much “vision” he winds up coming across as either stunning or miasmatic.
But in the end, when the movie depends so much on character, you expect a little more than what I feel the movie delivered. Yes, Gordon-Levitt does a fine job, but there’s not much for him to work with. He plays his role well, but there’s nothing for him to develop. And I’ll always have a crush on Isla Fisher, but as Lovlee Lemons, her depth is limited by the “stripper with a heart of gold” cliché… she doesn’t even get a chance to develop that other cliché, the femme fatale, as she disappears from the last third of the film entirely.
In the film’s defense, though, the other two people who watched it with me thought it was excellent. Maybe they had more realistic expectations.
Topics: Movies | 1 Comment »
September 14th, 2011 at 7:54 pm
This is the first review I’ve found that even mentions how little a majority of Kansas Citians know about hockey. I agree with your assessment of the movie, but thanks especially for that, because the constant everyone loves hockey!/he’s a hockey hometown hero/Pratt’s plan to work in a hockey store/conversation sprinkled with hockey terms in the first half of the movie got to be maddening. Why didn’t they just set it in Manitoba?