A movie like Greedy People is a few script revisions away from being a great black comedy thriller. It’s the type of movie Quentin Tarantino or The Coen Brothers would’ve written and then stuck in a drawer because they couldn’t give it the panache to make at least a few characters likeable.
I’m reminded of Suburbicon, the movie directed by George Clooney on a script they co-wrote and starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac. There’s a hint of of Fargo or Blood Simple but no redeeming characters like Norm and Margie Gunderson. You can probably guess why the Coen Brothers didn’t direct it because they couldn’t work with it. And it shows in Clooney’s handling.
The same problem is with this movie as it gives you no reason to even care about who lives and who dies and if they were the types who deserves their deaths in the first place. I’m reminded of Very Bad Things and how we were expected to laugh at the accidental death of a prostitute and intentional death of a hotel employee. It doesn’t exactly work. But at least filmmaker Peter Berg showed us that there are was fates than death.
In the fictional town of Providence somewhere in the South along the coast, Will Shelley (Himesh Patel) is beginning his first day on the job as a police officer. His wife, Paige (Lily James), is pregnant and busy on painting the house even without Will’s insistence he do it so not to affect her health. He is assigned to work with Terry Brogan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt),, who uses his authority as a cop to his own selfish advantage.
Terry stops off at the house of a woman he has an affair with while working, leaving Will as a lookout for the woman’s husband. There’s a tasteless Chinese joke here that would’ve been funny 50 years ago, but not now. Anyway, Will hears of a report thinking it’s a burglary but is unable to get Terry to come out of the house. So, he goes to a flashy upscale home where Virginia Chetlo (Traci Lords) is in the kitchen with the music on loud.
Will sees the door is open and goes in with his service weapon drawn. Virginia gets mad when he accidentally fires the gun and attacks him violently. Why would someone do this? I don’t know. Because all it does is set up for Virginia to die as she gets impaled in the back of the head (just like the prostitute in Very Bad Things). From here the movie goes off the rails as Terry shows up and they find a basket full of $1 million.
They decide to take the money and stage the scene. Apparently, it wasn’t a burglary call but something else like indecent exposure. Will’s father was a criminal so he’s afraid they will think it was intentional he killed Virginia whose husband, Wallace (Tim Blake Nelson) owns some local restaurant. But the money was for a hit on Virginia as he’s having an affair with a co-worker. All of this could’ve worked out if the writer Michael Vukadinovich and director Potsy Ponciroli made us root for one character.
Will isn’t a bad character but for some reason he and Paige end up doing awful things. And unlike Bill Paxton and Bridget Fonda in A Simple Plan, it’s not done out of desperation, so we can’t empathize with them. Terry and Wallace are the bad guys and a more skilled filmmaker would’ve known that. But killing off people who don’t deserve their fates takes the movie from the black comedy realm into full-blown thriller which this movie quickly becomes in its second half. I like Jim Gaffigan but his role as The Irishman, a hitman who rambles psychobabble doesn’t even feel like a real person.
Also, by making Will and Terry’s captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba) the only sympathetic character is poor writing especially since she’s only on the peripheral of the story. Her character pops up every now and again but she’s really never seems as important to the story except for the ending which is of course assuming what she does is confirmed by the court.
This movie reminds me of Free Fire, that strange shoot-em up movie from 2016 where a bunch of criminals meet in an abandoned warehouse and a gunfire erupts for over an hour. When that movie had John Denver’s “Annie Song” playing just because it was popular back in the 1970s the time frame of the movie, I felt there was too much of a wink at the camera.
And that’s the problem with this movie. It’s winking too much at the camera without deserving of it all.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 