Leave it to that Buffy hounder, XANDER to find a good film to get us excited about this summer. OUT OF SIGHT seems to be that film that Clooney should have made after FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. Kind of weird actually. Antonio Banderas is kicking ass this summer as Zorro, in the film I strongly feel should have come after DESPERADO, and now Clooney has his first rock solid film since his Rodriguez film. And, it's happening while Robert is shooting his next film. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.... Coincedence? I think not. Personally I love Elmore Leonard novels and this one sounds great. Man, as long as it has Mr Cheadle, you couldn't keep me away. He is so damn awesome in everything he's done. I was a major PICKET FENCE fan till stupid CBS moved it opposite X-FILES and it was a choice I was forced to make. Anyway, here's the first look at OUT OF SIGHT....
Agent Xander reporting for duty.
I had the good fortune to be able to see a "work in progress" print of Steven Soderbergh's OUT OF SIGHT not long ago; here's the skinny.
You've been getting lots of disappointed reactions to summer fare so far--DEEP IMPACT, THE X-FILES, SNAKE EYES...well, let me assure you that OUT OF SIGHT doesn't suck at all. It's pretty great.
It's no major artistic statement or anything...just an extremely satisfying, well-done caper yarn/love story, full of that Elmore Leonard flavor we know and love, courtesy of a bang-up script by GET SHORTY scribe Scott Frank. Soderbergh is a great actor's director, and George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Steve Zahn, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Albert Brooks and Dennis Farina all turn in great performances. And thanks to Soderbergh, they all click as an ensemble.
The story is pretty simple: Clooney is a career bank robber who busts out of jail in Florida with the help of Rhames, his buddy from a previous big-house stint. Lopez is a US Marhal who becomes their hostage and gets loose after failing to turn the tables on them. Clooney and Rhames head to Detroit where they hope to pull The Last Big Score Before They Retire, in this case ripping off a white-collar con they did time with (Albert Brooks, playing a character very clearly based on '80s Wall Street crook Michael Milken). Lopez gives chase, but the problem is, she's started to fall in love with Gorgeous George and is highly ambivalent about bringing him to justice. Cheadle and Zahn are fellow ex-inmates of Clooney, Rhames and Brooks who get caught up in the proceedings as well.
It's a crisply done, straightforward crime yarn with a lot of laughs, which mostly come from the Leonard dialogue. Clooney is very relaxed, and as a result he really comes off well--his most charismatic star turn to date. He's got terrific chemistry with Lopez, and they have one great scene together (temp-tracked to "1/1" from Brian Eno's Music For Airports--man, I hope that music makes it into the final cut) where they talk about their situation that's sexy as hell and highly reminiscent of some of the James Spader/Andie MacDowell scenes in Soderbergh's SEX LIES & VIDEOTAPE that just made the movie for me. Superb stuff. (There was actually quite a bit of Brian Eno on the temp track--they also used "In Dark Trees" from Another Green World in one scene very nicely, as well as "Deep Blue Day" from Apollo).
The non-linear structure and the dialogue will make a lot of people scream TARANTINO RIP-OFF, but that never seems like the case from where I sit--there's a lot more emotion here than QT usually gives us (with the exception of JACKIE BROWN). In fact, there's a very cool connection between this and JACKIE--you may or may not want to add spoiler space for this one--to wit, Michael Keaton turns up for a one-scene cameo as his character from JACKIE BROWN! As a life-long fan of crossovers and shared universes thanks to my comics obsession, I got a real kick out of it. They explain his appearance by saying that he's transfered from the ATF (of which he was an agent in JACKIE BROWN) to the FBI. I was told that Soderbergh plans to shave 10-15 minutes from the film before its release (the print I saw was 2 hours and 10 minutes); I hope Keaton's cameo makes the final cut.
Wrapping up: Solid, character driven crime story, very faithful to the "feel" of Leonard's books (hey, it's set in Florida and Michigan, Leonard's two great locales) with bang-up performances. Probably one of the most "grown-up" movies of the summer crop, and if Universal's marketing department doesn't drop the ball, it just might save Clooney's movie career, make a star out of Lopez and put Soderbergh back on the A-list. It opens June 26, I guess we'll all find out then. .
