American Animals
AMERICAN ANIMALS, drama, not rated, Center for Contemporary Arts, Regal Stadium 14, 3 chiles
There’s a little Leopold and Loeb to this heist-gone-wrong caper about a couple of students, too smart and too stupid for their own good, who plan and execute the imperfect crime. Happily, their scheme does not involve a little Bobby Franks, the victim of the above-mentioned sociopaths in their 1924 plot to commit the perfect murder. There’s a librarian who gets roughed up a bit, but the intent here is not to do harm, but to do well.
The plotters are college kids looking for zest and purpose in their lives. They decide to hit the books — but the books in question are among the most valuable in the land, held under lock and key in the rare books section of a library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. The prize is John James Audubon’s Birds of America, with a street value of some $12 million. Sweetening the pot is a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) sees the books on a freshman orientation tour. He mentions them to his best buddy, Warren Lipka (Evan Peters), and a lightbulb goes on. Here’s a way to kick the freshman blahs and make a pile of money in the bargain. The boys recruit a couple of other accomplices, Chas Allen (Blake Jenner) and Eric Borsuk ( Jared Abrahamson), and the game is on.
Writer- director Bart Layton keeps the pace brisk and entertaining, ratcheting it up from breezy fun to nail-biting suspense. An opening title tells us this is not based on a true story — it is a true story. These guys did plan and execute this robbery back in 2004, and it is no spoiler to reveal that their best-laid schemes went awry. Layton, a British documentary filmmaker, dips into his documentarian’s bag to pull in footage of the four real perpetrators. The originals are in some ways even more interesting than their impersonators, and their on-camera interviews, intercut with the action and carrying the chastening hindsight of seven-year hitches in the penitentiary, add a riveting layer of perspective.
Heist dramas, whether inspired by truth or fiction, are one of the most durable of movie tropes, and you’ll feel echoes here of many classics, from Big Deal on Madonna Street to Ocean’s 11. These lads definitely had Reservoir Dogs on their minds. But movies don’t always make a great template for real life. If there’s a moral to take away here, perhaps it is, “Don’t try this at home.” — Jonathan Richards