Flypaper

This is a very funny movie directed by Rob Minkoff and written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Tim Blake Nelson and Jeffrey Tambor were the only actors I was familiar with, but the starring roles were played by Patrick Dempsey (as Tripp, our hero) and Ashley Judd (as Kaitlin, our heroine).

The big picture is that a trio of professional bank robbers have paid off the bank's security expert to bypass the alarms but not, for some reason, the security for the vault. They enter just before closing time through a door on the roof. At the same time, two redneck yokels enter through the front door to pilfer the bank's ATM machines, which, again for some reason, are located within the bank's lobby. All hell breaks loose when the two gangs meet.

Eventually Tripp, just a customer, brokers a peace deal between the pros and the yokels: each gang gets what they came for, leaving the other gang alone. The customers and employees are herded into the bank's lunchroom to wait while the gangs go about their business. The professional trio has a laptop, cutting torches, and arthroscopic tools to delve into the innards of the vault, while the rednecks have only C-4. The script kept me laughing without ever descending to slapstick, although our yokels dance the line. The dialogue is almost always sharp, funny when it needs to be, even funnier when you least expect a comedic outburst.

There were two problems that bothered me. Tripp is an absolute genius who refers several times to needing his medicine, which for some reason he never gets. Tripp has a photographic memory, remembering every detail about everything that goes on around him, using tremendous powers of inductive reasoning to figure out what's going on when all around him are in a panic. He was too good to be real, and we were given no background information on him at all. All the characters were taken as we find them in the bank with no background, which normally I have no problem with. But Tripp was too good. I needed some information on him to understand why he went to the lengths he did to parse through all the action and make it make sense.

The other problem is that the ending wrapped things up too neatly. I understand the scriptwriters needed to get us out of there and to the happy ending in 90 minutes, but they rushed the solution by me in just a few quick shots, and having spent an hour getting there, I wanted a little more time to have it sink in before Tripp and Kaitlin had their end-of-movie kiss.

The plot is a predictable boy meets girl during bank robbery, boy gets girl in the end when he solves the whodunit, but the writers gave us a great roller coaster ride to get there.