The Lookout
It’s pretty amazing that movies like War get huge marketing blitzes behind them while a film like Scott Frank’s The Lookout comes and goes with little fanfare. I noticed a small bit of online advertising for the movie before it came out, was intrigued by the trailer, but never made it to the theater to catch the flick. I finally Netflixed it and, hey, it’s pretty good.
“What?! ‘3rd Rock from the Sun’ was totally the balls! Recognize!”
The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the kid from “3rd Rock from the Sun” and 10 Things I Hate About You) as a young man who used to be the bee’s knees, but has since suffered brain damage in a terrible accident. He’s a bit like the hero from Memento, except with actual brain damage ((You do realize that the guy in Memento didn’t actually suffer from real memory loss, right?)), though not as severely. Our hero lives with Jeff Daniels (who will forever be “the other guy from Dumb and Dumber“) — a wise blind man who sees all (yeah, yeah) and watches over our hero in a fatherly fashion. Our hero works nights cleaning a bank, and because banks only appear in movies to get robbed, he meets a strange and mysterious fellow (played by that guy from Match Point), who sets the plot in motion.
The heisting actually gets in the way of what is really a character study about a person who’s gone from hero to zero, knows it’s happened, and knows there’s nothing he can do to change it. It’s a very sad look at a sad situation. Gordon-Levitt’s character was the big man in high school, and now he has difficulty functioning in the real world by himself. He struggles on a daily basis with the weaknesses of his own mind, trying to reconcile what he is with with he was. Then he robs a bank. Nifty.
The heist itself is OK, and the story from then on is OK (you can probably guess what our young hero ends up doing), but I really didn’t care. The meat of the story was elsewhere, and it was pretty good while it lasted. The heist element also introduces a lot of plot holes, which is sad because the story is otherwise well constructed.
Overall I recommend The Lookout. It’s one of those films you can talk about after you’ve seen it. You know, if you have friends. I don’t, so if you see the movie you can talk to me about it.
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