Watched this on Friday.
Grade: B-
Rosemarie DeWitt plays Cassie, a realtor who is on the phone with a collection agency when Sonny (Danny McBride), a middle-class man with anger issues, bursts into their office. His life seems to be falling apart due to the housing crisis. He lives in the suburbs in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona. He doesn’t have enough to pay for his mortgage, and noticing how much the value of the house has dropped since he bought it, he goes to the realtor who sold it to him to complain. That realtor is Cassie’s boss (played briefly but entertainingly by Seth Rogen), who is kind of a jerk, which doesn’t really help once he starts arguing with Sonny’s short temper. It escalates until Sonny throws the realtor over a rail and kills him. Unfortunately, Cassie sees the whole thing, and so Sonny kidnaps her and tries to ‘befriend’ her and make her see his side of things to not have to kill her. Unfortunately for Cassie, Sonny’s short fuse does not exactly tolerate realtor-selling tactics and from there things escalate until there are multiple people dying around Cassie as she tries to help her daughter and herself escape from Sonny.
The film plays as a violent, comedic noir-thriller. The director (Jonathan Watson in his directorial debut) and writer play it seemingly safe in the beginning, taking their time to establish the main characters and their current stage in life which is severely damaged one way or another due to the housing crisis. The film takes place about a decade ago during that crisis in hot Arizona. Most of the houses in those suburbs have been abandoned, leaving our leading lady and angry killer basically isolated. Danny McBride does a pretty good job as an angry man who is pushed beyond the edge due to a bad decision and greedy housing businesses. He easily and effortlessly jumps between crazy murderous killer to moronic and funny within seconds. It’s an interesting and unique performance (in this type of film at least) that plays well against DeWitt’s character who is a simple mother trying to provide for her daughter as best as she can under similar circumstances. The fact that they both find themselves in a similar financial situation in the same setting, due to the same reason while reacting in completely different manners, does lend the film a decent amount of depth. It is short and sweet at just over 80 minutes, and the film does start playing with audiences’ expectations the closer it gets to its finale in fun and at-times hilarious moments. Other than McBride and DeWitt, the rest of the actors do basically cameos, but they do their best and they do add to the film one way or another with good timing and good-to-excellent performances.
The film does not reinvent the dark comedy/noir genre, but it is a damn good time for a slow Friday evening. I shall be getting the 4K blu-ray if it’s at a decent price on release day. Recommended.
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