Flypaper (2011)

Flypaper arrives from 2011 with the weary confidence of a heist comedy that has studied its predecessors closely and learned almost nothing from them. Rob Minkoff, a director best known for animated lions and small talking mice, assembles two competing crews of robbers inside a single Credit International branch, then lets them bumble through explosives, double crosses, and a body count the screenplay treats as set dressing. The plot is a locked-room puzzle wearing a ski mask. Patrick Dempsey's Tripp flutters about the lobby deducing things, Ashley Judd's teller endures him, and Tim Blake Nelson and Pruitt Taylor Vince steal the picture as a pair of Deliverance rejects who cannot open an ATM.

The ensemble is notably multiethnic, with Mekhi Phifer, Octavia Spencer, Adrian Martinez, and Natalia Safran filling out the margins. Their presence is casual and unremarked, which is to say the film casts them and then forgets them, a practice we might charitably call naturalism and less charitably call indifference. Nothing in the script asks race to mean anything, and nothing in the script asks anything to mean anything. The lone gesture toward gender arrives in the final minutes, when Judd's Kaitlin is revealed as a master thief in her own right. It is a twist, not a thesis. The boys' club simply gains a new member.

On the matter of instruction, the film is innocent. It wants to amuse, not to edify, and it holds no brief against banks, wealth, or the systems that produce them. A robbery here is a mechanism, not a metaphor. What remains is a slight, twist-heavy trifle that premiered at Sundance, earned mixed notices, and vanished. We have sat through worse sermons. We have rarely sat through a sillier vault.