Best Laid Plans

"Best Laid Plans" has invited a lot of comparisons with "The Usual Suspects", but with its caper-plan-gone-awry storyline it reminded me more of "Palmetto" - except that it's not as good as either of those films. The whole set-up is rather laborious, and the payoff, while clever, doesn't really amount to much. Ultimately, this is a very unexceptional movie; you can easily find many of its equivalents in the "crime" section of your local video store. What makes it worth your time are the performances; Nivola, in particular, has an engagingly laid-back presence and Reese Witherspoon is good as usual. (**1/2)

I just picked Best Laid Plans up at the video store simply because there was nothing that looked better. Well, even though this isn't a great film, it was probably better than all those other videos in the store that day!

Best Laid Plansd is a dark crime thriller about Nick (Alessandro Nivola) who needs to raise some cash urgently to pay off some mob debts. He enlist his girlfriend Lissa (Reese Witherspoon) to seduce an old college buddy, Bryce (Josh Brolin), out of his cash and to cry rape. However, things do not go to plan when Bryce takes Lissa hostage and asks Nick for advice on what to do.

Director Mike Barker has really gone for the Tarantino side of filmmaking, which he does impressively. Surprisingly, Best Laid Plans is actually better than some of the Quentin Tarantino projects, including Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. It is more intriguing and clever than those two films due to an excellent screenplay and some really good performances; particularly from the rather unlikeable Alessandro Nivola and the stunning Reese Witherspoon.

Not faultless, but perfectly watchable and recommendable.

I rate Best Laid Plans 7 out of 10.

Having met his old buddy Bryce for the first time in years for a drink, Nick gets a call from him in the middle of night asking for help. He goes to Bryce's place where he gets told that Bryce pulled a girl that night, took her home, started messing around and then had sex. However immediately after sex the girl says that she is going to the police to tell them that she was raped. Bryce then takes Nick downstairs where he has the girl tied to a billiard table to prevent her leaving. The two men try to work out what they are going to do, but are things what they seem?

Opening with an interesting set-up, this film jumps back in time and immediately undoes itself with a plot that is interesting but not as good as it really should have been. The plot follows the fall of Nick as he needs more money to cover firstly the dreams he has and then the problems he gets into when he tries to get the money by crime. Essentially this film could have been a mix of Tarantino, Mamet and Usual Suspects twists but it falls short of any of those targets but still manages to produce a reasonably good drama with elements of each. The plot isn't as good once it jumps back four months although it still has enough movement to keep things going. The twists are not that great and the plot itself doesn't make as much logical sense as it would like to think that it does. Nor is it as clever as it would like to think – the small town America was well painted but the work on the characters was not as good.

Nivola leads the cast well with a nice performance of subtlety even if the material isn't always there for him. Witherspoon walks the film rather easily with a simple role that only really gets interesting towards the end. Of the rest of the cast Brolin is OK, Howard makes a solid appearance and generally everyone else turns in solid performances. It was a film that I felt the characters could have been more important and better developed but they were still good enough for the cast to work with.

Overall this is a fairly typical thriller with a twist. It seems to want to be a bit like Tarantino with the dialogue edge of Mamet and the twists of things like Suspects but it doesn't really get close to any of them. Still, it produces an engaging thriller that, although not original, is distracting at least.

Like the title might suggest, I'm sure there were some great ideas behind this movie, but they got lost trying to come together. It's a fairly watchable thriller for most of the running time, mostly due to Nivola and Witherspoon giving muted performances. But the problem with this kind of thing is that it just isn't clever enough to really outsmart the audience. It isn't necessarily that you know what's coming, but the fact that you know SOMETHING is coming, some kind of twist, that it has to be pretty off the wall to take you in. Unfortunately, here the movie plunges into farce and it's a let down after an often tense, and well calculated build-up.

Still, Nivola is always nice to watch :-)

This was a pleasant surprise. I really didn't know what to expect, but what I got was a very intelligent movie with more than enough twists and turns to keep things rather unpredictable. It took a little too long to get everything set up properly, and it perhaps had one twist too many, but overall, it was a great film with strong performances by Alessandro Nivola and Reese Witherspoon. Definitely worth checking out.