The Lookout

This is a writer's movie, directed by Scott Frank, who wrote Minority Report. Of all the things I love in a film, I may love brevity most, and this is a tight movie, with hardly a moment that isn't essential to the plot or to character development.  It's 99 minutes of tense, noir drama.

Chris Pratt is a guy who has everything and who throws it away chasing beauty in one stupid act. Now he pays a heavy price every day, dealing with his own guilt and the damage he has done to himself. Chris has a fractured sense of sequence, of cause and effect, and he struggles with day-to-day life and still makes stupid decisions.

A group of very bad guys decide to enlist Chris for a robbery and the ensuing drama is nightmarish, exciting, and smart. The viewpoint is almost entirely Chris' and the story plays with the viewer's expectations of sequence and cause and winds to an exciting and satisfactory conclusion. A very, very fine first film.

Four stars.