MASTERMINDS (Jared Hess). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (September 30). See listing. Rating: NNN
Masterminds is, in no uncertain terms, a mess. Jared Hess’s heist comedy is flabby and shapeless, like a series of sketches strung together at 95 minutes it seems to be both far too long and oddly truncated.
It’s based on a true story, but everything in it is exaggerated to a preposterous extreme. It features an incredible cast of comic actors and asks little more of them than to sport ridiculous haircuts and yell at each other in broad Southern accents. Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos and last year’s Don Verdean, loves ridiculous haircuts.
There are many, many pratfalls. Jason Sudeikis hits Zach Galifianakis with a trash can lid. Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon have a knock-down fight in a discount department store. Leslie Jones, who co-starred in Ghostbusters with Wiig and McKinnon after Masterminds wrapped, turns her character’s slow burn into a gag that runs the length of the film.
So, yeah. This isn’t a good movie. But I laughed an awful lot. Certainly more than I expected I would after the wobbly opening sequence, in which stoogey armoured-car driver David Ghantt (Galifianakis) explains to us how he done got suckered into robbing his employers because he had a crush on co-worker Kelly Campbell (Wiig).
That’s the true part: in 1997, Ghantt and Campbell conspired with a few others to rob the Loomis, Fargo & Co. office in Charlotte, North Carolina, getting away with more than $17 million. Ghantt fled to Mexico immediately afterward, while his collaborators stayed home and celebrated with ridiculous purchases. The man who orchestrated the scheme, Steve Chambers (Owen Wilson), eventually decided to have Ghantt killed rather than pay him his share of the loot.
Hess takes these facts and sets them in a world of absolute fiction, reimagining Ghantt as a sweet idiot who’s still the smartest person in his cohort. The criminal world of Masterminds operates on a spectrum that starts with buffoon and ends with boob, with only Jones’s and Jon Daly’s FBI agents in possession of above-average IQs.
The actors run with it, which means we get to see a range of oddball comic performances. Galifianakis goes with wide-eyed naïveté Wiig is slightly more thoughtful but still kind of a dope. Wilson’s Chambers presents himself as the most reasonable person in the world while talking utter bullshit. Sudeikis, who shows up late in the picture as Chambers’s hit man, plays the character as a posturing sociopath who hides a secret spiritual self. And McKinnon, who has a small role as Ghantt’s fiancée, straps on a dead-eyed grin and just waits for her chance to steal every scene.
Hess and his screenwriters don’t have much of a plan for their characters once Ghantt goes to Mexico, there’s little for Galifianakis to do but make flustered phone calls to Wilson and Wiig and ask for the rest of his money. Eventually, the plot mechanics kick in, leading to a chaotic climax at Chambers’s estate, but Hess can’t orchestrate action or suspense there’s no tension to anything, just a lot of running and shouting.
But even that clunky third act gives the actors room to find weird little flickers of ideas or character beats that can be fanned into laughs. I can’t imagine Masterminds will be a hit, but I can imagine it being studied by comics and actors for generations. It’s just too strange to ignore.
