On The Lookout

In making his directorial debut, screenwriter Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Dead Again), has outfoxed himself. The Lookout (Miramax; opens March 30) has a genuinely interesting protagonist, keenly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who gave such a raw and forceful performance in 2005's Mysterious Skin and is clearly destined for better things. But Frank has plunked him down in a tired heist scenario, so rote that, like Gordon-Levitt's Chris Pratt, I'm having trouble remembering much about it just a few weeks later.

Chris is a star athlete in high school who, in the blink of eye, lost everything, including his short-term memory capacity and his world-for-the-taking attitude, in a murkily recalled car crash. Paired with a blind roommate, Lewis (the ever-reliable Jeff Daniels), while in rehab, and trying to stick to daily routines (which, Memento-style, he keeps pinned to his refrigerator, and repeats to himself time and again), Chris pushes a broom after-hours at a local bank. Into his narrow, cautious life swaggers Gary (British actor Matthew Goode, from Match Point), who encourages him to live it up--and if that includes dallying with his stripper girlfriend Luvlee (Wedding Crashers co-star Isla Fisher), so be it. Gary's fidelity is to the almighty dollar, and the one string attached to his friendship is Chris' participation, willing or not, in the robbery of his bank.

Wisely underplaying Chris' disabilities, and a good enough actor to skirt the fact that he is in no way a jock, Gordon-Levitt gives an honest, empathetic performance, a discretion that might have helped Goode, who's a little too zealous playing American. Except for its lead performance, however, the film is unexciting--a little too respectable--and as flat as its Midwestern landscapes (Winnipeg standing in for Kansas City, a locale used for more flavorful crime in The Ice Harvest). It's so tidily made the disappearance of a major character from the story creates a gaping hole, something that a little smoke and mirrors might have more easily disguised, and setting up a potential twist that never pays off. How and why Frank failed to seal this crack, which mars the clean if dulled surfaces of The Lookout, is a bigger mystery than anything in the film.