Today’s featured film in the cinema that is the Bogardus living room, Bandits.
In what is now almost cliched movie making, the story is told with a non-linear timeline. It starts with our “heroes” surrounded in an LA bank and arguing about how thing would have not turned out so badly if it wasn’t for the girl. Not long into it we realize that this is the end of the movie, as we are whisked back a couple months to the spur of the moment prison escape of Joe Blake (Bruce Willis) and Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thorton.)
Bruce and Billy are good together in this movie, sort of like the Oscar Madison & Felix Unger of the criminal set. The bank robberies were done using an interesting M.O. and with the combination of the 2 character’s personalities and how they reacted to each unique situation would made for a good movie, if they had just stuck to that. But the woman who brings about the demise of our bank robbers also brings about the demise of the movie. Don’t get me wrong, Cate Blanchard is good in her part but the subplot of the love triangle is so strong that it detracts from the movie’s “real” plot.
The only reason this gang of “Sleepover Bandits elude the Oregon cops for so long is that they seem to be operating with an ineptitude normally reserved for the law enforcement professionals from back woods Alabama. Right off the bat they can’t hit the broad side of a full-size cement truck as it drives through the gates of the prison and then lose it trail in minutes as they drive right by where the truck plowed through a small fence into a field.
The ending was way too Hollywood happy ending. I was actually disappointed to learn that he upcoming shoot out was going to part of the trick ending. I would have been to have these two idiots actually kill each other.
One thing I really liked about this movie was the soundtrack, not the part where Cate & Bruce sing a duet of Total Eclipse of the Heart, but the general background tunes, which included my favorite late 80’s tune, Tanita Tikaram’s Twist In My Sobriety.