The canon of popular American movies this side of the millennium counts several crime comedies in its ranks, among them Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” trilogy, David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” and Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys.” Ten years on, that last film’s star, Russell Crowe, headlines Derrick Borte‘s “The Get Out” — a largely underwhelming reminder of the potential thematic richness of this type of cinema, and of how difficult it is to successfully pull off.
Crowe plays Manco Kapak, a nightclub owner from Albania who tells us, in an opening voiceover, that he has been happily settled in the United States for many years. Crowe seems a natural fit for a comic play on the cliché of the heavily accented, unnerving Eastern European criminal: His ability to hint at violent undercurrents of rage, bubbling right underneath the surface of his unforced charisma, was already put to good use in Borte’s previous directorial effort, the 2020 road-rage thriller “Unhinged.” Here, however, the joke is that appearances can be deceiving — or to be more specific, that trying to act like a character in a movie is a reckless, unwise thing to do.
Early on in the film, Manco suffers a heart attack while having sex with his girlfriend, Sunny (Teresa Palmer), but contrary to what the genre and character type might suggest, he is perfectly willing to slow down, change his eating habits, and sell his club to retire with his loving partner on a tropical island somewhere. Though he has been laundering a bit of cash for a cartel for years, he is no Tony Montana, greedily climbing to the top of the food chain and ruthlessly offing his competitors; some may see his relaxed approach to keeping a little money off the books as distinctly European, simply because it runs counter to the alarmist, moralizing rhetoric of so many American crime films.
