Life Of Crime English Movie
You know what this film reminds me of? It remind me of one of those birthday parties where you're having fun, moderate fun. Not wild fun, but enough to keep you from getting bored. Suddenly, midway through it, the host's drunk uncle crashes the party and creates a ruckus, chaos everywhere. And you're sitting there wondering to yourself, "OMG! Why is this happening? What could possibly possess this guy to trash this perfectly normal party?". To explain this extremely detailed analogy, let me start from the beginning.
There are times when you're just tired of other genres of movies. But even then, you know there's one genre that you could always rely on: a crime comedy. There's just something about a film that makes you laugh, but at the same time makes you wait with bated breath for the inevitable twist in the tale at the very end. Films like Fargo, Pulp Fiction, the Ocean's Trilogy, or more recently, American Hustle and Wolf of Wall Street are prime examples of that.
Having said that, the comedy has to be funny and the crime has to be crazy enough and different enough from the other tons of films in the genre. And this is where Life Of Crime takes a beating.
Life Of Crime, adapted from the novel The Switch, borrows it's setup from countless other films: kidnapping of the wife (played by Jennifer Aniston) of a wealthy guy for a ransom. The reason that countless films have been based on this premise is that it always makes for an interesting watch. How the director builds on it is what makes or breaks the movie. So, returning to the analogy, the film is going decently well during the first half, moderately fun to watch. This is when the director Daniel Schechter (also the writer of the film) decides to crash the party, and it's all downhill from there on.
The husband completely vanishes from the scene, there's a romantic angle between one kidnapper and the wife, another between the other kidnapper and the husband's mistress, and the third kidnapper just pops in and out of the picture on the press of a button by the director, every time he needs to crack a racist joke. The solution is shocking, in the sense that despite a 1000 options that held merit, the director chose the one that makes no sense whatsoever.
All said and done, there are some moments of inspired craziness in the first half, thanks to the uniformly good performances across the board. Jennifer Aniston; Yasiin Bey, Will Forte and John Hawkes as the kidnappers; Tim Robbins as the husband; Isla Fisher as his mistress and Mark Boone Jr., all play their parts admirably. While the film is never really funny (the other half of the crime comedy genre), the actors all bring an infectious charm to their performances.
So at the end of the day, what fun is it to go to a party that I've already told you is going to get crashed? You'd be better served staying at home, popping in the DVD and watching American Hustle again instead.
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