“I’m not a bad guy. I just made bad choices. I have a plan.”
Derek Cianfrance doesn’t have a lot of movies in the director’s chair, but his 2012 The Place Beyond The Pines was a pretty solid film. Since then he’s been pretty quiet, and he’s finally surfaced once again with the rather off-kilter “based on a true story” crime comic drama Roofman. he’s brought Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, and Peter Dinklage along for the ride. It’s been something of a sleeper, coming with little advanced buzz and flying under the radar. There’s not a lot of competition out there right now, so there’s a small sweet spot here where the movie can make an impact, and it’s worth a look while you wait for your favorite horror film to haunt your Halloween movie-going.
Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum) was an Army Ranger, so he has a specific set of skills that served him well while he was serving his country. Then one day it was all over, and he found it tougher than he expected to take care of his wife and daughter. His fellow retired Ranger, Steve (Stanfield) has been making his living outside the law by forging identification documents. Steve points out his gift for detail and seeing what others can’t see, and he should find a way to use those skills, and that’s exactly what he does. He notices patterns, and there was a huge one he could exploit at your neighborhood McDonald’s. He discovered that when they made their cash pickups, all of them followed the same routine, and he took advantage of it. He would climb on the roof and make a hole to get into the building without setting off any alarms. When the morning crew arrived, he would politely relieve them of their money and lock them in the freezer, but not without a smile, and even his coat if someone forgot their own that day, as well as calling the police so they wouldn’t be in there long. He decided he needed to hit 45 jobs to get what he needed for his family. Of course, he couldn’t help lavishing them with great gifts; after all, it was his daughter’s birthday party and his lack of a gift that started the whole thing. All of that likely brings attention, and on his daughter’s next party the cops come rolling in to arrest him. He is sentenced to over 40 years in prison.
That could have been the end of the story. But when his daughter tells him about mommy’s special friend, he decides to break out. Once again, his eye for detail and patterns gives him the way out. Because he’s very “hot”, Steve won’t help him until he hides out a while. So he breaks into a Toys R Us store and creates a little home away from home inside the store. He patches in monitors and watches the staff in the everyday life. He ventures out into life and donates stolen toys to a church toy drive and for single mom/Toys R Us employee Leigh (Dunst). He gets pretty close and starts to shower them with gifts and “help” by selling stolen video games from the store. The heat catches up when store manager Mitch (Dinklage) shows up early one morning while he’s cleaning up in the bathroom. He makes it look like he ran away while going to his hiding place. But the heat is on now, and he realizes he stayed too long. When Steve demands 50 grand to set him up with papers, he has to perform a job at the Toys R Us after fixing it so Leigh won’t be working that day. He just pulls it off with a few complications and now faces a choice. Run right now, or see Leigh one more time.
You can guess where it goes from there. I’m not a huge Dunst fan. I thought she was really bad in her Spider-Man films, and it doesn’t help that we’re reminded of that role here. Jeffrey ends up with a lot of Spider-Man merch in case we forgot. She’s not great here, but she doesn’t have to be. Tatum is going to do the heavy lifting, and all she has to do is act ignorant. She’s got that role down pat. No real chemistry here, and that is a shame. Tatum has better chemistry with her daughter, who never really trusts him. But it works well enough here. A bigger disappointment is Peter Dinklage. The true crime here is how underused he is. If you watched the trailer, you saw both of his best moments. Most of the rest is from a black & white monitor where Jeffrey treats the employees like his favorite prime-time television show.
The story is clever, and the film is paced nicely. I thought the 2-hour running time might feel padded, and there are certainly moments it does. But it’s not near as bad as all of that and moves well enough that time goes quickly. The film feels highly serialized, and I thought it might have done better as a limited stream series. It’s compact in the settings and doesn’t take too many chances outside of the twisting plans of a crook who really is a pretty nice guy. The film could have some staying power, and who knows. When Halloween hits us, “The Roofman may still be in the area.”
