The best thing about Life of Crime is the cast, a lively combination of character types, scene-stealers, and one slumming superstar. And yet the movie feels like a community-theater walk-through. Despite the tentpole presence of Jennifer Aniston and its roots as an Elmore Leonard adaptation (it shares characters with Leonard’s Rum Punch, which Quentin Tarantino shot as Jackie Brown), Life of Crime is dialed-down and low-rent, lacking the bravado that might boost it a notch or two.
Aniston plays Mickey, weary trophy wife to Detroit bigwig Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins plays the role with greasy bonhomie and a Donald Trump haircut). Petty criminals Ordell (Yasiin Bey, who used to be called Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes, late of The Sessions) conspire to kidnap Mickey and collect a cool million off the secret stash Frank’s been skimming from his real-estate chicanery. Ordell and Louis were previously incarnated by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown. Nothing against those stars, but Bey and Hawkes are at least as cued-in to the lowlife rhythms of Ordell and Louis’s haphazard scheme as the bigger-name actors.
Among the problems with this movie is that Leonard’s story has an ironic, Ruthless People-like stall built into the middle of it, which is easier to savor on the page than in a film. Life of Crime’s circa-1978 trappings also pale next to the juicy period blitz of American Hustle. And director Daniel Schechter works in such a modest key that his fondness for actors doesn’t get the structure it deserves.
Other players include Will Forte as Mickey’s lily-livered secret admirer (whose surprise appearance in the middle of the kidnapping leads to a funny subplot), Sons of Anarchy hair-beast Mark Boone Junior, and Isla Fisher as Frank’s conniving mistress. As for Aniston, the film doesn’t make enough room for her particular comic talents—and having to spend part of her role with her face covered by a mask doesn’t help. Hawkes and Bey are the core of the picture, and it would be fun to see them again in something underhanded again—an update of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, perpetually one step behind the smarter people in the world. Opens Fri., Sept. 19 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 99 minutes.
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