Bandits (2001)

Barry Levinson's Bandits arrives from 2001, a year when a studio caper could still concern itself chiefly with the logistics of robbing banks and the romantic entanglements of its stars. Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton play Joe and Terry, escaped convicts who kidnap bank managers the night before a heist and spend the evening with their families. The gimmick earns them tabloid fame and a spot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Cate Blanchett's Kate collides with them, literally, and the film settles into a love triangle that consumes its second half. The cast is white and the concerns are personal. Troy Garity appears as the dim getaway driver, a mixed-race presence the film treats as scenery.

Kate is the closest thing to a progressive figure here. She abandons a failing marriage and asserts a measure of control over her circumstances. The screenplay, however, keeps her defined by the men who want her, and her eventual agency arrives as a plot twist instead of a thesis. Thornton's Terry suffers from a catalogue of phobias and imagined ailments, played for laughs at every turn. The robberies generate no argument about wealth or its distribution. Joe and Terry steal so they can retire in Mexico. That is the entire economic philosophy, and the film is content to leave it there.

The framing device, a lurid reality show called Criminals at Large, gestures at media satire without ever pressing a point. Levinson has assembled three performers of genuine charm and pointed them down a highway with no destination in mind. The result is agreeable, overlong, and untroubled by the questions a later decade would insist upon. It wants only to amuse, and mostly it does.