The Lookout
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Directed by: Scott Frank
Starring:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt - Chris Pratt
Jeff Daniels - Lewis
Matthew Goode - Gary Spargo
Isla Fisher - Luvlee
The Lookout is to film noir what The Olive Garden is to Italian food. What it serves up is technically correct but a completely abomination to anyone that’s had the real thing.
The film sets the stage to be a rather classic film. Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt once again earning his title as “The New Johnny Depp”) is a high schooler who had it all until an unfortunate incident involving a convertible, a thresher, and high velocity leaves him with a massive brain injury and the death of his future. Now he works as a janitor at a bank, struggling to complete the most simple daily tasks. But when a shady character named Gary (Matthew Goode) draws Chris into the world of crime by paraphrasing Scarface (“Whoever has the money has the power!”), Chris becomes the lookout for Gary’s attempt to rob the bank.
The word noir means dark and that word just doesn’t apply to the lighting and tone of the story, but the actual narrative. What makes it such a great genre is that the characters live in shades of grey and the moral outcome tends to be just as ambiguous. But The Lookout forgets all that and decides to be a film noir without any balls. It has a femme fatale who isn’t fatale. It has a villain who has more humanity in his asthma inhaler than in his entire body. And it has a lead who should be providing us with unreliable narration and a skewed timeline but instead simply has a convenient head injury that lets Gordon-Levitt continue to show off his fine acting skills but does nothing to enrich the story. It almost seems like the film is consciously trying not to be Memento and it succeeds in that Memento was excellent and this film is not.
Scott Frank has a lot of credit as a screenwriter (Get Shorty, Out of Sight), but with his directorial debut, he has a limp and ineffective thriller that should thank its lucky stars it had the good fortune to cast a lead as strong as Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
3.23.07