As people, the characters in The Lookout have clear flaws: asthma, blindness, head injury. But as characters, they’re solid, intriguing and emotional. The complexities come from first-time director Scott Frank’s excellent screenplay, but, like the characters, the movie is also flawed.
Speeding a convertible into a parked combine landed Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) 90 feet from the accident and with a serious head injury. Unable to do tasks that require basic sequencing — making spaghetti, for example — he takes classes and drugs to deal with his disability.
Frank is primarily a screenwriter, whose screen credits include The Interpreter, Out of Sight and Get Shorty, and his experience comes through in solid, believable characters. Pratt, a former hockey star, lost everything and has been reduced to ordering O’Douls and hitting on his therapist. So when bad guy and asthmatic Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) pulls a $20 out of his leather jacket and delivers a smooth pickup line to the hot girl at the bar, you understand why Pratt ditches his best friend for a taste of cool.
The taste soon runs sour. To salvage his life, Pratt scrambles against his disability and the band of criminals after him, including I-Wear-My-Sunglasses-at-Night- Bone (Greg Dunham).
Pulled into the action is Lewis (Jeff Daniels), Pratt’s blind roommate who provides the comedy and conscience. Lewis’ no-B.S. dialogue helps bring the script back from moments of weakness. When Spargo reveals his plan to rob the bank where Pratt works as a night janitor, the script gets anti-corporation preachy and veers close to resembling a low-quality thriller.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is again a dark and troubled young adult as he was in the outstanding Brick. While The Lookout doesn’t take as many U-turns as Brick, the story is still interesting and Gordon-Levitt’s acting makes it easy to cheer for him even as he makes obviously poor decisions.
Matthew Goode is a great villain who seems to have things a little too well organized for a Midwestern bank robber, but ends up tripping up as much as his mentally impaired co-star. Goode’s performance is as pleasantly tempered as his slow courting of Pratt as an accomplice, but he has no trouble switching from compliments to the business of bank robbing.
The Lookout is good because it’s an action movie with real dialogue and characters, but it doesn’t wow you in the end. Pratt’s injury influences the structure of the movie, similar to Memento, bumping the direction above similar thrillers, but the movie runs out of energy before the climax. The opening scene is visually inspired and sets the emotional bar high, and the rest of the film never quite lives up.
Oh, and Pratt isn’t really the lookout considering another guy sits in a car outside the bank watching for cops. But it’s a better title than The Fall Guy.