Blog From The Bench

A whole lot of nothing-- tired heist-gone-wrong shenanigans, glib violence, a dose of anti-middle-class-respectability, with Christmas, a la Bad Santa, as the emblem of all things domestic, and just a hint of the earlier film's reluctant but central sentimentalizaing of the (surrogate) father-child relationship. Oliver Platt's comic drunk gives fullest voice to the movie's ideology, and the only interesting scene is his desecration of Christmas dinner, presided over by his silent ice-queen wife, representing domesticity, alluring but inscrutable and conniving and castrating; on the other hand Cusack's scattershot attempts to attain manhood and impress the equally conniving femme fatale by becoming an outlaw and killer are, in the noir tradition, doomed from the start. Not new ideas by any means, still potentially interesting in their troubled and troubling macho way; the whole thing is so slight and tossed-off, though, that it all feels empty rather than ambiguous or unsettling.