Exceptional acting boosts heist comedy
Here’s a case of a pleasing average movie. We don’t get many of those. We get movies great and awful, and then we get movies that have strong virtues but are obnoxious or repellent. But movies like “Masterminds,” which is right on the line between good and bad, but whose problems don’t outweigh its pleasures, are rare. And so perhaps a little grade inflation is in order.
A comedy based on the 1997 Loomis Fargo robbery in North Carolina, “Masterminds” tells the story of a motley gang that robbed a
security company of $17 million in cash, the biggest heist in American history. On the downside, the movie is something of a mishmash of tones, and the end brings no particular sense of arrival. The story just stops where it had to stop, and viewers walk out feeling about the same as when they went in.
But the movie has one great, redeeming quality, which is its comic acting. In the two lead roles, it has Zach Galifianakis and Kristen Wiig, who are able to be hilarious without playing for comedy. They are completely in their roles, completely invested in the seriousness and truth of their characters’ thoughts and emotions, but they are aware, as if watching from the tiniest of distances, that they are playing ridiculous people. And so they tilt it just a bit and open a window into human absurdity.
They’re just two people having an office flirtation. David (Galifianakis) and Kelly (Wiig) both work at Loomis, and then some months after she leaves, she falls in with a bad crowd, including Steve (Owen Wilson), who gets the idea to rob Loomis. But they need an inside man. You know, someone easily persuadable, not too smart, someone so crazy about Kelly that he’d do anything ...
It’s a strong role for Galifianakis, almost tailor-made for a comedian specializing in dimwitted losers with profound aspirations and a delusional sense of dignity and possibility. There’s something strangely appealing about a character who wants the world and doesn’t know how pathetic he is — maybe because we all secretly wonder if we’re in the same boat and just don’t know it.
As for Wiig, who leads him on by making him believe that, if he does this, they will go to Mexico and have a great romance, she does several things at once and makes them look as natural as breathing. She has to be genuinely seductive, but also a parody of seduction. She has to convey a complete physical indifference to this guy, but an emotional sympathy. And most of what she does is without words, just a face onscreen. Don’t be distracted by how funny she is — Wiig is one of the most interesting actresses we have right now.
Not everything works so well. Jason Sudeikis shows up as a perverted hit man, and he does a fine job of being creepy, but the character itself is discordant and strains at the boundaries of the comedy.
But “Masterminds” delivers for the most part. Kate McKinnon, as David’s wife, does her usual frozen-faced, crazy-eyed weird thing, but this time she’s funny. And director Jared Hess, either through his own invention or an intelligent willingness to let his actors run with it, finds little ways to lift almost every scene.
You might forget “Masterminds” five minutes after you see it, but you’ll enjoy it in the moment.
Zach Galifianakis and Kristen Wiig are completely invested in the seriousness and truth of their characters’ thoughts and emotions, but they tilt it just a bit and open a window into human absurdity.