Rating: 1.5/5

Writers: Sacha Gervasi and David N. White (screenplay), Stephen Hamel and Sacha Gervasi (story)
Director: Malcolm Venville
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Vera Farmiga, Judy Greer, James Caan, Peter Stormare

By night, he’s a toll collector. By day, he expends just as much energy fending off his wife’s overtures to make some babies. That is all to say – Henry (Keanu Reeves) is expending very little energy, very little motivation, and very little ambition in his life. Henry’s life philosophy seems to be best described as “well, anything is better than this,” which explains (sort of) how he ends up in jail for a crime he (honestly) didn’t commit. An old pal knocks on Henry’s door, after one of those nights in the toll booth and mornings with Debbie (Judy Greer) begging for babies, and his vague request for Henry to join in on an intramural game is met with blank acceptance.

Anything must be better than whatever the hell is going on in Henry’s life, right? Wrong. That old friend (Fisher Stevens) is not playing baseball, he’s robbing a bank. Henry becomes unwitting driver for the crime as it’s taken place, and then unwitting fall guy when it goes awry. Sticking to his life philosophy, Henry seems to decide even jail is better than his life, so he refuses to name names or point fingers, landing himself square in the clink. And that is where, if we are to believe HENRY’S CRIME, Henry finds himself and his purpose.

After a promising beginning, the entire plot of the film gets mixed up in Henry’s apparent dreamlessness – not when it comes to being unconscious, but when it comes to having some sort of direction or drive in life. Henry is not necessarily a loser – he’s never really lost anything, because he’s never really tried for anything. Thanks to an offhand comment from a fellow jailbird, Henry gets stuck on an idea – it he’s doing the time, he may has well do the crime. Suddenly, Henry has a dream – to rob a bank he has, according to the justice system, already robbed. This is not a wise dream.

HENRY’S CRIME is the sort of wacky, insular film that could only “happen” on-screen. Its task is to, for two hours, convince us otherwise by means of being so entertaining that we forget all the way that it’s inconceivable. The problem with HENRY’S CRIME is that, approximately two minutes after the audience realizes that this is the type of film it is, the entire thing turns collapses into its own ridiculousness. From there, it only gets more ludicrous (without any sort of clever spin) and miles more boring. But still worse, the film think it’s considerably slicker and cleverer than it is – its Sharon Jones-heavy soundtrack and OCEAN’S ELEVEN-lite score only make that much plain.

The film takes all of the weakest and least compelling parts of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, Sundance dumb-bunny-bank-robber flick FLYPAPER, classic THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and a long string of other films about unlikely criminals and regional theater. They’re tossed in a blender and set to “frappe,” and then “boring.” And that’s the (forgive me) real crime of HENRY’S CRIME – not that it so blatantly draws from other, better films, but that it doesn’t use any of them to make something entertaining. Henry’s plan to rob from the bank has a nifty little blueprint, one that is prime for some mildly entertaining hijinks that simply never come to fruition.

The film has an immensely likable cast, but they’re wasted here in weakly written roles that never strike any consistent notes. The talented Vera Farmiga is all but wiggling to get out of an uneven role that tries to harness the “but she’s an actress!” conceit as a way to pass off her constantly clashing attributes and actions. James Caan plays Henry’s cellmate in a performance that starts off fun and whimsical, before evolving into something that’s just on the wrong side of unsettling. Yet, Keanu Reeves is an interesting choice here for Henry, as his sleepy eyes and demeanor serve him well for about the first half of the film. Of course Henry is sleepy, he’s doped up on American-dream-deferred tryptophan, but Reeves never snaps out of that, even when the film attempts to ratchet itself up into a giddy heist flick.

It should come as no surprise that half of the screenplay and story credit for HENRY’S CRIME goes to Sacha Gervasi, who is also responsible for THE TERMINAL. That was another film about an exceedingly common man thrown into extraordinary circumstances, but whereas Tom Hanks’ character in THE TERMINAL was not only unwitting, but also not complicit in the events that turned his life upside down, Reeves’ Henry is afforded no such sympathy. Boredom is not an excuse to go to jail. The premise of this film is not an excuse to make a film.