The Bag Man (2014) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Drama | Thriller
Tagline: The cat's in the bag.
Tagline: An unintentional comedy.
John Cusack (2012) and Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook) star in this action-packed crime thriller about a hit-man named Jack (Cusack), who takes an assignment to deliver a mysterious bag to his craft boss (De Niro) with strict instructions not to
peek inside. With the help of an elusive prostitute (Rebecca Da Costa, Breaking At The Edge), Jack battles a mess-load of gunfire, a slew of crooked cops and unruly mobsters on a deadly quest to deliver the precious cargo and earn a big pay day. This
action-packed crime thriller also stars Crispin Glover (Alice In Wonderland), Sticky Fingaz and Martin Klebba.
Storyline: A criminal bides his time at a seedy motel, waiting for his boss after killing several men and making away with a mystery bag.
Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, July 31, 2014 -- John Cusack has an affinity for characters who, like the professional assassin, Martin Blank, in Grosse Pointe Blank, display "a certain moral flexibility" when
it comes to killing their fellow human beings, but suddenly find themselves at a turning point. Besides Blank, Cusack has played such characters in War, Inc. and The Numbers Station and now in The Bag Man (also known as Motel),
a dreary thriller that probably sounded better on paper than it plays onscreen. Co-written and directed by first-time helmer David Grovic, The Bag Man began as an original script by character actor James Russo (who played one of the Speck brothers
in Django Unchained). Like many scripts by actors, Russo's (as rewritten by Grovic and Paul Conway, also actors) contains several good parts, but the whole is less than their sum. The writers and director are obviously trying for a pulpy neo-noir
atmosphere of inescapable evil, but they've neglected to anchor it in anything remotely recognizable. An exercise in style over substance, the film plays out in a lurid fun-house world that grows increasingly laughable as you figure out what's really
happening—and most viewers will reach that point long before the end.
The Bag Man was shot in 2012, but Universal kept it on the shelf until 2014, when it quietly dropped it into a few theaters for a week. The film earned just over $60,000 (no, that's not a typo), before being sent to its video graveyard.
The Bag Man is one of those stories that depends on a shady mastermind who pulls everyone's strings, or at least enough of them to keep the audience guessing. This one is named Dragna, and he's a fabulously wealthy businessman played by Robert De
Niro with a whiff of the sulphurous detachment that he brought to his early role as Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart, but with much bigger hair and more florid speeches. We know that Dragna's business isn't strictly legitimate, because, as he sits
eating dinner opposite John Cusack's Jack in a huge private jet that only a billionaire could afford, Dragna gives Jack the kind of job that only a crook would offer. He wants Jack to pick up a bag from point A, bring it to point B, which happens to be a
specific room at an out-of-the-way motel, and wait there for Dragna to meet him. And Dragna has one more stipulation: Under no circumstances is Jack to look inside the bag. Hints in the conversation suggest that Jack himself is some kind of
hitman/contractor, whose skills are well-known to Dragna.
It's a potentially great opening, raising all sorts of interesting possibilities. (Maybe the bag contains whatever was in that mysterious briefcase retrieved by Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction.) But the warning signs begin flashing when Dragna
asks Jack if he's ever read German novelist Hermann Hesse. As a child of the Sixties, when everyone read Hermann Hesse (and some of us even studied him), I can assure you of one thing: Whenever a movie script drags Hesse into the mix, the movie is
in trouble.
As are most mysterious assignments in the movies, Jack's turns out to be "off" from the get-go. Everyone he meets is either trying to kill him or steal the bag, and usually both, beginning with the courier who makes the initial delivery, thereby
underestimating Jack's own prowess as a killer. The courier's body spends the rest of the film traveling with Jack in a car trunk whose lid refuses to close all the way, which is The Bag Man's idea of a running joke. When Jack reaches the
designated motel—it makes the Bates Motel look homey—he encounters further adversaries in the form of several G-men, two psycho-pimps, Lizard and Guano (Kirk 'Sticky Fingaz' Jones and Martin Klebba, doing a twisted Mutt and Jeff routine), and the local
sheriff, Larson (Dominic Purcell), who is brutal and thoroughly corrupt. The OCD motel clerk, Ned (Crispin Glover), doesn't seem to be after the bag, but he clearly spells trouble. The mere request for Room 13 sends him into a fit of nervous tics.
Then, of course, there's the femme fatale, a zoned-out Israeli hooker who works for Lizard and Guano and goes by the name of Rivka (Brazilian actress Rebecca Da Costa, Seven Below). She's the first to accost Jack after he's checked into Room 13
(per Dragna's instructions), and she's far too tall, too beautiful and too unmarked (at least initially) to have led the life she's supposed to have been leading. Everything about her is suspicious, and yet she's the only one who doesn't ever try to harm
Jack (which may be the most suspicious thing about her).
After Jack experiences many bizarre and violent encounters involving guns, vehicles, shovels and knives, Dragna finally appears and begins explaining it all, but at that point you may notice that The Bag Man still has almost half an hour to run.
What more could possibly happen? The answer, unfortunately, is way too much. Characters like Dragna are best left to the viewer's imagination. The more their machinations are revealed and explained, the less frightening and the more ludicrous they
become.
Director Grovic tips his hand in an early scene when he shows Dragna savagely disciplining an employee who lost a lot of money at his currency desk, even though, as she protested at the time, she knew nothing about trading and Dragna made her substitute
for someone who was ill. No businessman, legitimate or otherwise, could operate in such a manner for long if he wanted to remain successful, but The Bag Man's final act reveals this psychotic approach to be Dragna's SOP. Having arrived in the guise
of a film noir, by the end The Bag Man reveals its true identity as the tale of a typical comic book super-villain who's mad, mad, mad, I tell you. Even Herman Hesse would have giggled.
The Bag Man is harmless enough, but life is too short and there are too many better movies for me to encourage anyone else to waste their time on it. If you must, then the Blu-ray's technical merits can't be faulted. My advice is to approach the
film as an unintentional comedy, because that's the only way it makes any kind of sense.
[CSW] -2.4- I couldn't have said it any better than this reviewer:
"I wanted to watch The Bag Man not because I thought it seemed pretty good, but because it got such terrible reviews, and I wanted to see how bad it actually was. Well it was bad. In fact it was awful. But in a good way. It was actually quite
entertaining, and I laughed quite a bit because the plot was so ridiculous and the lines were so laughable. As I watched I was reminded of the Rocky Horror Picture show: ridiculous plot, strange characters, dark lighting, everything takes place at night,
the only things missing were the musical numbers. I foresee The Bag Man ending up a cult classic played on late late-night cable over and over with a following of young people who have memorized and recited lines from the movie for their amusement. The
lines were truly whimsical, silly, and pulpy. This is no Tarantino flick by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think the producers ever intended it to be. They just wanted to make a fun movie. And they accomplished that. 2 stars not cause I didn't
like it, because I did. But 2 stars because The Bag Man was pretty terrible, but in a good way."
Total theatre of the absurd with crazy characters doing all sorts of ridiculous stuff.
Netflix Streaming (HD) - No D-Box.
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