‘The Get Out’ Review: Russell Crowe Leads a Crime Comedy That’s Neither Funny nor Thrilling

Carrie (Nina Dobrev), simultaneously the most memorable and most irritating character in “The Get Out,” is introduced as a savvy bank teller whose suspicions are clearly raised when hapless community college teacher Jeff (Aaron Paul), who has been bullied and blackmailed into a life of crime by a corrupt cop (Josh McConville), shows up to deposit $99,999 in his account. When she writes a note on the back of his check telling him to meet with her after work, you expect her to be a smooth operator who wants in on the cash.

Instead, she takes him to a bizarre “Kill Bill”-themed Asian restaurant, where the female servers wear minidresses patterned after Uma Thurman’s iconic yellow jumpsuit and serve desserts topped by a figurine of O-Ren Ishii in her flowing white kimono. There, she reveals to a baffled Jeff that the entire reason she ever became a bank teller is because she loves the movie “Point Break” and wants to become a bank robber, forcing herself into his life of crime with the zeal of a Bodhi that has finally found his Johnny Utah.

It’s always a danger to explicitly mention the great works of prior films in the genre you’re trying to make your own, lest your own work seem pale by comparison. Unsurprisingly, director Derrick Borte, whose features “American Dreamer” and “Unhinged” are fairly straight-laced generic thrillers, is no Quentin Tarantino or Kathryn Bigelow, and Carrie’s fandom of the great crime directors of the past does the generic slog of a film she’s in no justice. Nor does anything else about her, really: across the film’s 90 minutes, the character awkwardly skirts from film geek to adrenaline junkie to possessive sex maniac, with Dobrev’s weak comedic timing doing very little to cohere her into anything more than a jumble of disparate gags.

Even worse, Paul isn’t offering her anything to work with as the drippy, pathetic Jeff, a sad sack who would typically serve as a straight man to his forced partner-in-crime. Only Paul, caught in a film that can’t really decide which side of the “crime comedy” scale it should put the most weight on, isn’t playing the character comedically, offering a straightforwardly tortured performance that tips over every scene between Jeff and Carrie into screeching annoyance. It’s a mark of all the failures surrounding “The Get Out” and its tonally troubled script from Borte and Daniel Forte, based on the 2010 Thomas Perry novel “Strip,” which can’t decide how seriously it wants us to take its story, and tells a sprawling ensemble crime saga without an ensemble worth caring about.

‘The Get Out’Courtesy Everett Collection

The film’s awkward title (I’d have suggested the filmmakers “drop ‘The,’ it’s cleaner” but, well…) refers to the get out of its main-ish protagonist, Manco Kapac (Russell Crowe, who previously worked with Borte on “Unhinged”). An Albanian immigrant who has risen to become the owner of a successful nightclub in Los Angeles’ Koreatown (as the complete lack of memorable locations or real use of the setting might tip audiences off to, the movie was actually shot in Australia’s Gold Coast), Manco largely lives the high life with his younger girlfriend Sammy (Teresa Palmer), but is getting older and more stressed about the more unsavory, money laundering parts of his business that really brings home the bacon.

When he has a heart attack during a round of sex with Sammy, Manco begins seriously considering leaving the business behind for retirement. His anxiety only increases when Jeff robs him at gunpoint after work, and he floats selling the club to oddball businessman Joe (Luke Evans). These events turn out to be part of a complicated — but not actually that complicated to be interesting — plot that has him fighting for his life against the cartels as he attempts to survive and make his awaited exit from his life of crime a reality.

Although Crowe is best known — and somewhat notorious for — his reputation as a po-faced, serious, and sometimes abrasive actor, he’s always unexpectedly thrived in the comedy lane, as exemplified by his turn in “The Nice Guys.” So its not a surprise that “The Get Out” is most watchable when it clears the runway and lets Crowe take over. Manco isn’t necessarily the most dynamic protagonist in the world, but he’s centered and relatable in his anxiety over aging and his genuine love for Sammy, and an amusing deadpan presence with an accent the actor commits too.

But although the film is ostensibly built around him, in practice, all the different elements of “The Get Out” pulled from other sources rather than natural outgrowths of each other. Manco and Claire don’t belong in the same film together, and neither does the downbeat Jeff with the colorful, karaoke-singing Joe, and none of them are fleshed out or interesting enough that you would want to see them in their own film. The contrived plot stitching these people together never justifies the many leaps in logic it needs to take to get them in each other’s orbit with a sufficient amount of intrigue or thrills that you’re able to stop paying attention.

Shot and lit like a random rerun of a basic cable episode from the 2000s, “The Get Out” further embarrasses itself with its hat tips to its genre forebears by making its own complete lack of visual sauce far more apparent. Borte takes no risks with “The Get Out,” shooting it with a complete lack of visual panache or identity to call its own. Action scenes are rendered with zero tension, comedy scenes with barely any sense of pacing; the film is so unadventurous you’re practically begging for an expected split screen or any flourish to spice things up.

The whole endeavor feels, unavoidably, like streaming detritus, the type of film that litters VOD menus to tempt bored audiences to click because they recognize the stars in it. It is to the crime comedy what that weird “Kill Bill” restaurant is to a Tarantino film: an imitation of something far more creative and fulfilling.

Grade: D

Vertical will release “The Get Out” in theaters on Friday, June 26, followed by a VOD release on Tuesday, June 30.

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