Genre

I have to be honest; when I got this title and saw that Jim Gaffigan was starring, I didn’t know what to expect, but I went into this film with some low expectations.  I’m a fan of Gaffigan, and I own a few of his stand-up albums, but seeing him headlining a thriller, well, it was a tough leap for me.  Now that I’ve seen the film, I got to say I’m impressed by what he pulled off with this film.  That being said, as I was watching this film, I couldn’t help but see a similarity between Gaffigan and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.  I doubt this was intentional, and perhaps it’s just my subconscious attempting to make these connections, but Gaffigan’s performance in this film  is on par with many of the performances we saw from Hoffman in his later years. As for the film, American Dreamer follows Cam (Gaffigan), a down-on-his-luck schlub who at one point was living the American dream: a good job, a nice home, and a wife and child.  Then he lost his job, and everything else seemed to disappear around him. Now he’s a driver for a ride share company, where he struggles with paying child support and has had a bit of a mental breakdown.
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It’s frustrating seeing a film starring Michael Chiklis and Bruce Willis and knowing before you’ve even watched five minutes of the film that it’s not going to be good.  I mean, come on; you have the star of The Shield and then an action movie icon, but neither can save this film.  10 Minutes Gone is one of those films where on paper it seems like a surefire hit, but somehow instead of a white-knuckle action thriller, the result is a snooze-fest that will keep you guessing as to why these actors signed on for this film. Frank (Chiklis) has been hired by Rex (Willis) to pull off what seems to be an easy heist.  Frank and his team seemed to have thought of everything and have even put together some backup plans, but as expected, the heist ends up going bad, and in the process Frank is knocked out cold and loses 10 minutes. In this time he’s lost possession of the jewels, and he needs to figure out what happened to them before Rex has him killed.  It’s not a bad idea for a movie, but it’s the execution of this film that is a mess.  Willis and Chiklis do their best to make the dialog work, and at times the can make the scenes flow, but once the film shifts to any other character you start to wonder if this film was written by a 12-yea- old boy who just binged a bunch of older action/ detective films while chugging Red Bull and snorting lines of sugar.
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