Bandits ***
Directed by: Barry Levinson
Written By: Harley Peyton
Starring: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett and Troy Garity
Rated PG-13 (language, adult situations, violence)
Fall is probably my favorite season of the year. There are all sorts of boring reasons that I could list, but the one that you’re probably most interested in (as you’re reading this) involves movies. Summer is over, kids are back in school, and Hollywood starts bringing out ‘riskier’ films. The costume dramas, the Robin Williams dramatic pieces, the Mirimax Oscar Contender ® -- things like that. Now, while Bandits probably won’t win any awards, it’s a character piece that would have been overlooked in the summer.
By character piece, I mean that it shifts genres. The previews look like a heist/caper movie with a romantic comedy subplot. Those previews aren’t misleading. However, what they don’t show is that the romantic comedy is more along the lines of Being John Malkovich than the collected works of Julia Roberts. More on that later.
Bandits is about 2 bank robbers – Joe (Willis) and Terry (Thornton). As is usual in heist movies, they want to go straight. Which takes money. Which means robbing banks. Joe is the muscle, Terry is the brains. Terry’s plan: daylight robberies. They kidnap the bank manager the night before the robbery, and spend the night with him/her, and then, before the bank opens, have the manager open the vault and give the ‘all-clear’. Works like a charm. Terry’s plans are great. Until Terry gets hit by a car driven by Kate (Blanchett). Terry, you see, is a hypochondriac, and thinks he received a concussion. Kate, on the other hand, is massively depressed. Not the most rational pair. Kate drives Terry back to the hideout, where she meets Joe and Harvey (Garity). Harvey is Joe’s cousin, a wanna-be stuntman and their ‘front man’. Terry knows that an outsider in the mix is a bad thing, Joe wants to sleep with Kate, Harvey is dense – LET THE FIREWORKS BEGIN!
Probably the best part about this movie is the actors. Billy Bob Thornton is an amazing character actor. Just look at Slingblade. Bruce Willis can play nearly any role you put in front of him, and play it well. Cate Blanchett is a name that isn’t familiar to most moviegoers, but she’s really, really good. (She was Queen Elizabeth in Elizabeth, a psychic in The Gift, and will either be praised or pilloried by geeks when she assumes the role of Galadriel in the upcoming The Lord of The Rings trilogy).
Another big plus in this movie is the focus on character rather than plot. George Bernard Shaw (a playwright) once said that he hated plots. He just put characters into a situation and watched what happened. That’s what we see in Bandits – we don’t get massive amounts of detail about the planing of the heists, we don’t have a moral. It’s not like it’s a Martin Scorsese movie. What we have is a strange marriage/love triangle thing (ala Being John Malkovich or Chasing Amy) that works because we believe the actions that the characters are performing, and we believe the actors that are playing the characters. The principle characters are well written and well rounded.
This review is shorter than previous ones, but, honestly, there isn’t a whole lot of detail that can be written about. I don’t have the words to describe character interaction, and the subtleties therein. Stuff blows up, guns are involved, but the focus is on character.
