Best Laid Plans
USA 1999
Reviewed by Liese Spencer
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Tropico, the US. After the death of his father, Nick hopes to leave his job and move away. He meets Lissa and they begin a romance. Debts swallow Nick's inheritance, so he decides to be the getaway driver for a robbery planned by a colleague. The heist goes according to plan, but the drug dealer they steal from discovers the money is missing.
Abducting Nick, the dealer takes him to a warehouse where people are being tortured. He releases Nick but demands $15,000, sending a picture of the now-dead colleague as persuasion. Nick convinces Lissa to help him in an elaborate sting on his friend Bryce which involves framing him for the rape of an underage girl. Lissa - armed with a fake, underage ID - picks up Bryce in a bar and they subsequently have sex. Lissa claims to have been raped but instead of letting her go and paying the money, Bryce phones Nick in panic. Arriving on the scene, Nick finds Lissa handcuffed in the basement. He persuades Bryce their only option is to kill Lissa. He pretends to murder her, puts her in the car boot hoping to drive her home. But Bryce insists on coming with him.
On the way, the car is hijacked by the drug dealer and his gang. Abducted and taken to the warehouse where Lissa is being held hostage, Nick stumbles into an adjacent room where he discovers the robbery was an elaborate hoax to extort his non-existent inheritance: his colleague is alive and well; the drug dealer is really a finance major. Back in town, Nick and Lissa bump into Bryce and confess their scam. Traumatised by Bryce's rape of her, Lissa leaves but Nick runs after her and the pair are reconciled.
Review
Like its anti-hero, Best Laid Plans is an educated underachiever. Scripted by 26-year-old screenwriter Ted Griffin and directed by British director Mike Barker (The James Gang), this over-plotted, over-long potboiler flashes with intellect and style before collapsing into a silly charade. It opens explosively enough with Nick answering a late-night call from his friend Bryce. Driving through a brush fire, Nick arrives to find Bryce in a state of panic: after picking up a girl in a bar he is now being accused of rape. Nick offers to threaten her into silence, and descends to the basement where she is being held. "We're fucked," he tells her. "You're telling me," she replies.
The film cuts to four months earlier, and Barker's faux first act seems to augur a murky noir tale of rape, murder and extortion. Setting his convoluted story in a fictional space somewhere between The Postman Always Rings Twice and Red Rock West and shooting it using a poisonous palette of liverish reds, livid greens and toxic yellows, Barker successfully suggests the sinister claustrophobia of Nick's home town. Stuck recycling rubbish at the local dump, he stares out at a desert landscape full of human litter: dim-witted workmates he despises, one-time buddies who patronise and bore him. When his late father's will fails to provide the money he needs to escape, crime is the next desperate step. Thanks to Alessandro Nivola's naturalistic performance, it's possible to swallow the unlikely scheme Nick and Lissa subsequently hatch to blackmail Bryce. Unfortunately, from then on the film falls apart.
Ethical questions and motivations raised by the action are ignored in a hectic rush to dazzle us with verbal and visual tricks. For instance, the relationship between Nick and his late father goes undeveloped while the amorality of the film's central players is awarded only improbably erudite lip-service. College-educated he may be, but would Nick really persuade Bryce into murdering Lissa by arguing it would achieve "the greatest good for the greatest number of people"? And how many psychopathic drug dealers would ask you if you had read Adam Smith?
A generous viewer might read the friction between Griffin's gritty, blue-collar thrills and college-boy banter as a deliberate inconsistency designed to prepare for the final twist. But if such absurd speechifying makes more sense in the light of the film's trick ending, Griffin's anti-climactic resolution only raises more problems. Like a sour surprise birthday party, Griffin's bathetic coup de théâtre shows the various, apparently unconnected players in Nick's nightmarish drama all plotting against him behind the walls of a hastily constructed set. Perhaps it's meant to add another layer to Griffin's role-playing game of self-serving deception, or perhaps it's meant to critique the luridly theatrical earlier events, but either way the bald conclusion merely seems an easy, cheating way out.
Developed from a short story Griffin wrote at college, Best Laid Plans has a callow cleverness which never gets to grips with the weighty subjects it summons. Setting itself up as a self-conscious study of greed, lust and survival, it succeeds only in sending a group of ciphers through a maze of moral dilemmas. While the best noir has an ambiguity that keeps us questioning everything we see and hear, Best Laid Plans is just implausible, its muscular performances undermined by literate but ludicrous dialogue.
Credits
- Producers
- Alan Greenspan
- Betsy Beers
- Chris Moore
- Sean Bailey
- Screenplay
- Ted Griffin
- Director of Photography
- Ben Seresin
- Editor
- Sloane Klevin
- Production Designer
- Sophie Becher
- Music/Orchestration
- Craig Armstrong
- ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
- Production Companies
- Fox 2000 Pictures presents a Dogstar Films production
- Executive Producer
- Mike Newell
- Co-producer
- Nancy Paloian-Breznikar
- Video Segment Producer
- Jeffrey M. Balis
- Production Co-ordinator
- Linda Warrilow
- Unit Production Manager
- Dwayne L. Shattuck
- Location Manager
- Diane Friedman
- Post-production
- UK Supervisor:
- Bruce Everett
- UK Co-ordinator:
- Tracey Gibbons
- Assistant Directors
- Paul N. Martin
- L. David Silva
- Basil Bryant Grillo
- Script Supervisor
- Jacqueline Clay
- Casting
- Mali Finn
- Associate:
- Emily Schweber
- Camera Operator
- Nathaniel Goodman
- Steadicam Operator
- Gregory W. Smith
- Video Displays/Stage Production
- E=mc2
- Video Supervisor:
- Robert Morgenroth
- Video Co-ordinator:
- Brett Cody
- Video Conversion:
- Jaime Oria
- Digital Effects
- The Film Factory at VTR
- Digital Effects Producer:
- Alan Church
- Effects Compositors:
- Matthew Twyford
- Sally Clayton
- Dave Sewell
- Film Scanning:
- Peter Talbot
- Zoe Cain
- Special Effects
- Co-ordinator:
- Gary D'Amico
- Foreman:
- Louis Michael Nigro Jr
- Phil Bartko
- Jay Bartus
- Dawna Hammond
- Randy Krohmer
- Art Director
- John Zachary
- Set Designer
- Sloane U'ren
- Set Decorator
- Nicki Roberts
- Costume Designer
- Susan Matheson
- Key Make-up Artist
- Brad Wilder
- Key Hairstylist
- Blatt Blatt
- Main Titles
- The Film Factory at VTR
- Main Titles Design
- Simon Giles
- Opticals/End Titles
- Cine Image
- Keyboards/Programming
- Stephen Hilton
- Richard Norris
- Guitars
- Ali McLeod
- Paul Keogh
- Piano
- Craig Armstrong
- Orchestra Conductors
- Cecilia Weston
- Craig Armstrong
- Orchestra Leaders
- Gavyn Wright
- Perry Montague-Mason
- Music Supervisor
- Nicola Fletcher
- Music Production Manager
- Sandy Dworniak
- Music Editor
- Graham Sutton
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Rupert Coulson
- Soundtrack
- "Why Can't He Be You" by Hank Cochran, performed by Patsy Cline; "Worried Eyes" by/performed by Eagle-Eye Cherry; "Angel" by Robert Del Naja, Grantley Marshall, Andrew Vowles, Horace Hinds, performed by Massive Attack; "Flowers in December", "Look On Down from the Bridge" by Hope Sandoval, David Roback, performed by Mazzy Star; "Glow Worm" by Paul Lincke, Lilla Cayley Robinson, Johnny Mercer, performed by The Mills Brothers; "Tijuana Lady" by Ian Ball, Paul Blackburn, Thomas Gray, Benjamin Jo Attewell, Oliver James Peacock, performed by Gomez; "Susanna", "Morentita", "La Bamba" by Graham Preskett, Mauricio Venegas; "You Must Be an Angel" by John Morton, Jim Wolfe; "Faithful & True" by Richard Myhill; "Twisted Mess" by Neneh Cherry, Cameron McVey, Paul Simm, Craig Armstrong, performed by Neneh Cherry
- Sound Mixer
- Reinhard Stergar
- Re-recordists
- Robin O'Donoghue
- Dominic Lester
- Richard Street
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Ross Adams
- Dialogue Editors
- Matt Grimes
- Michael Redbourn
- Sound Effects Editors
- Martin Cantwell
- Andy Kennedy
- ADR
- UK Recordist:
- John Bateman
- Foley
- Artists:
- Pauline Griffiths
- Paula Boram
- Mixer:
- Ed Colyer
- Editor:
- Peter Holt
- Animal Trainers
- Lisa Smith
- Diane Branigan
- Sue Chipperton
- Cast
- Alessandro Nivola
- Nick
- Reese Witherspoon
- Lissa
- Josh Brolin
- Bryce
- Rocky Carroll
- bad ass dude
- Michael G. Hagerty
- Charlie the proprietor
- Terrence Howard
- Jimmy
- Jamie Marsh
- Barry
- Gene Wolande
- lawyer
- Jonathan McMurtry
- vet
- Terrance Sweeney
- priest
- Rebecca Klingler
- diner waitress
- Kate Hendrickson
- bar waitress
- Owen Bush
- vagrant
- Jess Woodrow
- Roach Coach clerk
- Jamie Marsh
- Barry
- Michael McCleery
- recycling owner
- Sean Nepita
- Freddie
- Jody Wood
- brushfire cop
- Teddy Vincent
- lawyer secretary
- José Mendoza
- Renaldo
- Jane Morris
- realtor
- David Mandel
- evangelist
- Alec Berg
- Jeff Schaffer
- phone guys
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- 20th Century Fox (UK)
- 8,390 feet
- 93 minutes 13 seconds
- Dolby
- Colour by
- Technicolor Ltd., London
- Prints by
- Fotokem