Review: Masterminds

That sound you hear for most of Masterminds' 95-minute running time is the wailing of crickets as a group of very talented actors flail about trying to extract some semblance of comedy from a woefully unfunny script. To be fair, there are chuckles to be found now and again, but none are worth suffering through the often pointless meanderings of the skit-style narrative.

Brought to you by director Jared Hess, the man responsible for the acclaimed Napoleon Dynamite and the maligned Don Verdean, and starring a slew of past and present Saturday Night Live stars, Masterminds is one of those based on actual events, stranger than fiction tales of how a bunch of losers pulled off one of the largest cash hauls in American crime history. Played with caricaturish redneck idiocy with a pageboy hairstyle by Zach Galifianakis, the film's central loser is David Ghantt, a small-town guy who is halfheartedly engaged to the bossy and humourless Jandice, whom the scene-stealing Kate McKinnon portrays as if Jandice were caught in a cult and plotting a very violent and bloody escape.

David also happens to be an armored truck driver for the North Carolina-based cash-handling company, Loomis Fargo. He is so trustworthy that he is one of the few non-managers who has the key to the vault. Naturally, this makes him a perfect patsy for his sexy and single co-worker Kelly Campbell (Kristen Wiig), who has been deployed by childhood friend Steve Chambers (Owen Wilson) to take advantage of David's romantic feelings and convince him to rob the company's vault so they can all become instant multi-millionaires.

For its first half, Masterminds almost plays like a comic riff of Double Indemnity as Kelly femme fatales the unsuspecting David into pulling off the heist. The problem is once the caper is done, the film doesn't really know what to do with itself. Kelly sends the lovestruck David off to Mexico, promising to join him once the coast is clear, then unsurprisingly becomes conflicted when Steve decides it's time for David to take the fall. Things become even more unnecessarily convoluted when Steve hires a hit man (Jason Sudeikis in full-on perv mode), who somewhat unexpectedly bonds with his target.

Galifianakis models a parade of terrible disguises (including one that David describes as "like Jesus and a cat made a baby"), has a too close for comfort encounter with an eel, fills a pool with his excrement after drinking the water in Mexico, and gamely executes all the foolishness the script requires but his gift for physical humour is squandered. The whole enterprise feels terribly lazy, as if Hess and his screenwriters couldn't be bothered to come up with anything but the most obvious jokes, most of which could have been written by anyone off the streets.

Masterminds

Directed by: Jared Hess

Written by: Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Emily Spivey

Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Ken Marino