A good time wasn’t had by all
Movie stumbles, but Pattinson shines in frenetic robbery-gone-wrong story
Some films are steak; others, merely sizzle. Good Time, with a slick, frenetic artifice that quickly descends from thrilling to insufferable, is a step down from that. It’s sizzle reheated in a microwave.
The film is the newest from New York filmmakers and brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, the latter of whom stars opposite Robert Pattinson in one of those classic robberies-gone-wrong stories. They play brothers Connie and Nick, who knock over a bank and then get hit with a dye pack that leaves them almost literally red-handed.
Nick (Benny Safdie), who clearly doesn’t have the life skills to cope with criminal behaviour, crashes through a glass door while running from the police, and is arrested.
Pattinson’s Connie, streetsmart and motor-mouthed, evades capture but now has to use the loot to bail out Nick.
And since most of the money is marked, he’ll need to get his hands on some more.
Pattinson has made as many bad choices (remember Remember Me?) as good ones in his career, but he continues to grow as an actor, and is easily the best thing about Good Time. As Connie, he delivers lies faster than most people could summon the truth, and if you managed to see him in 2014’s The Rover you’ll know he could have played the slow brother just as easily as the quick one in this tale. He has a way of disappearing into roles, perhaps honed from his necessity of hiding from his more rabid fans.
But one performance does not a film make, and despite help from Oscar nominees Jennifer Jason Leigh as Connie’s beleaguered girlfriend, and Barkhad Abdi as a hapless security guard, the film never really gains traction. First-timer Taliah Webster seems lost in the role of Crystal, a 16-year-old whom Connie half-woos, half-kidnaps during one wild night. Better is Maynard Nicholl as a fellow con man who spins a shaggy-dog story within the even shaggier main plot.
Good Time has been getting good reviews, perhaps helped by its Cannes-competition credentials. But it feels at times as though the directors came from a Nicholas Winding Refn retrospective and went straight into production, so garishly lit and blaringly scored is the result.
When Connie winds up at an amusement park after dark, it seems less a plot development than an excuse to show the greatest concentration of neon bulbs and black lighting. There’s a world of difference between a movie that makes you want to rave about it, and one that feels like you’re watching it from inside a rave.