Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste run a coupon scam worth $40M
Rated: R for language throughout. Running time: 2 hrs. (out of four)
‘Queenpins’
66
“Queenpins” has its moments, mostly when Kirby Howell-Baptiste is on the screen. As a sort-of-truecrime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more.
Writer-directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly let Kristen Bell make the introductions and tell the story. She plays Connie, onetime Olympic medalist in speed-walking, now a Phoenix resident stuck in a cul-de-sac of a marriage to an IRS officer (Joel McHale). Much of the couple’s savings went to unsuccessful fertility treatments, and what was designed to be the baby’s room is now a bittersweet storage area for detergent, Doritos, Wheat Chex — everything Connie has acquired by her avid coupon usage.
“Queenpins” is about how Connie and her best friend and fellow coupon fan Jojo, played by Howell-Baptiste, make the leap into their own sunny corner of the criminal underworld. First Connie starts acquiring apology product coupons from various companies after writing pithy complaint letters. Why stop there? The real-life Phoenix coupon scammers, arrested in 2012, certainly didn’t.
Soon enough, Connie and Jojo establish an inside connection to a coupon printing plant in Mexico. Reams of coupon freebies begin arriving to Connie’s doorstep, then sold online. A good deal for the online shopper; a great deal for the women. They become queenpins, with their own private jet, several cars and slow-mo struts in various montages.
The script toggles from their exploits on the way up to the pursuit conducted by an odd-couple, by-the-book pair of midlevel authority figures. Vince Vaughn is the U.S. Postal Service inspector, a reluctant cohort of the grocery store chain “loss prevention officer” portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser. They claim a little more of the narrative than is strictly necessary.
The bonus with this particular coupon scam is simple: The coupons aren’t fakes. The movie attempts, with sporadic success, to get at real, corrosive socioeconomic problems underneath the caper structure. The Mexican coupon factory worker, we learn, makes $2 an hour; his pregnant wife urges him to help these women out so they can all benefit. Jojo’s credit has been permanently ruined after getting hacked. The companies losing out in the scam can handle the losses, Connie figures. Rulewise, she says, just before the music comes up on the soundtrack to make the point, “it’s time to start bending ‘em a little.”
The bending comes to tens of millions. “Queenpins,” by contrast, doesn’t bend the rules much. It sticks to what has worked before, sometimes better (“Hustlers”), sometimes worse. The Hauser character’s relentlessly humiliated, until the all’s-well ending, and scenes of his character defecating in his pants while on a stakeout add the wrong sort of comic contrast.
As a diversion, the movie’s reasonably proficient mainline filmmaking, but after a while the musical score’s cuteness sounds like nails on a chalkboard, and who uses chalkboards these days? I cared about Jojo more than the rest, because Howell-Baptiste has every right instinct for both truthful comedy and quietly revealing drama. All the key actors have similar instincts. “Queenpins” brings them out in fits and starts.