Movie Review: "Good Time"

"Good Time": B.  Robert Pattinson, whom we last saw earlier this summer in The Lost City Of Z (reviewed here on May 15; B), continues to prove that he is not merely a one-trick zombie, as he stars in newly released Good Time.  Pattinson plays Constantine "Connie" Nikas, an unintentionally humorous small time crook who, for unexplained reasons, decides to bring along his mentally challenged brother Nik on an extremely ill-conceived bank heist.  Apparently the thought never entered Connie's mind that Nik would be useless even if things went smoothly, and a hindrance if things went poorly.  And, poorly they did!  Did Connie never see a TV show or movie where the bank teller surreptitiously plants an exploding red dye canister in the robbers' satchel?  

The entire story is replete with one bad decision after another.  Most, but not all of them, are made by Connie.  Nik picks a fight with a muscle-bound prisoner in a cell filled with hardened criminals, and gets pummeled.  A grandmother allows the fugitive brothers into her Queens residence late at night, falling for some flimsy explanation that they lost the keys to their "nearby" apartment.  The woman then retires for the evening, leaving her sixteen year old granddaughter (Taliah Webster) unattended.  Connie's girlfriend, Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh), fraudulently attempts to use her mother's credit card to charge $10,000 in a bail bond office, and then is astonished when the bank not only declines the transaction but calls her mother with a fraud alert.

Nik is played by Ben Safdie, who also co-directed the movie with his brother, Josh.  The opening scene in which a psychiatrist (Peter Verby) administers a test to the phlegmatic Nik, asking the patient to explain such common sayings as "The squeaky wheel gets the most oil," is done to perfection, offering a combination of tension and comedy.

But, this is Pattinson's movie, and the story itself does not do justice to his stellar acting.  It is at least initially hard to get a read on Connie.  Is he clever or stupid?  Maybe he's just a victim of bad luck, but stupidity certainly rears its head.  For example, while in the grandmother's apartment, he dyes his dark hair blonde in an attempt to avoid recognition on the streets, yet he leaves his copious facial hair untouched.  When he initially evades the cops he dumps his bright red jacket into a trash can.  What does he wear next?  A different red jacket.  Brilliant!

Pattinson's Connie brings back memories of Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon from 1975 (graded B in my Quarterly Cinema Scan on April 1, 2012).  Both are amateur bank robbers who can't get out of their own way.  There's something about both actors and both characters that wins our hearts, even while they are committing felonies.  The funniest line in Good Time is when clueless Connie, a certified loser, yells at another character, "You're nothing but a [expletive] loser!"  He says it with a straight face, and means it!  

A tip of the cap to David Lopatin, who goes by "Oneohtrix Point Never," for the musical score.  Unlike the music in Dunkirk (reviewed here August 4; C) which drowned out a lot of the dialogue, the music in Good Time has the right combination of relatively high volume during non-verbal scenes, thereby adding to the excitement, but smartly toning down while the characters are talking. 

The story goes from fourth gear to second at the point of the movie when Connie enters an amusement park.  It stays in second too long for my liking, thus slipping its grade to B.