Plot: A nightclub owner is on the verge of leaving his dangerous past behind for retirement with his girlfriend. When masked gunmen rob him, and he finds himself squeezed by ruthless cartels, a mysterious newcomer arrives with an interest in buying the business. With danger closing in from all sides, he must navigate a deadly web of deception, power, and survival — where escape may no longer be an option.
Review: With an Oscar and two Golden Globes to his credit, Russell Crowe is enjoying his sixties by appearing in a range of movies that some of his peers would consider beneath them. Stretching himself through comic book films (Thor: Love and Thunder, Kraven the Hunter) and a pair of horror movies (The Pope’s Exorcist, The Exorcism), Crowe has also delivered impressive turns as Hermann Goring in Nuremberg and the upcoming The Weight. But it is when the Gladiator star turns to more comedic roles that we see a different side of him. In the new neo-noir crime movie The Get Out, from Crowe’s Unhinged director, Derrick Borte, the actor not only gets to embrace comedy but also an Albanian accent as he leads an ensemble piece full of characters double-crossing one another in pursuit of money. While ultimately forgettable, The Get Out is a decent diversion.
Centered around a Koreatown nightclub, The Get Out follows Manco Kapak (Russell Crowe), an Albanian native living in Los Angeles who suffers a Viagra-induced heart attack when making love to his younger girlfriend, Sunny (Teresa Palmer). Looking to get out of the nightclub business, Manco aims to sell to Joe Carver (Luke Evans) and stop serving as a money laundering operation for the local cartel run by Rodriguez (Danny Zovatto). The plan seems to be in order until Manco is robbed by Jeff (Aaron Paul), a college professor paying back a crooked cop (Josh McConville). At first, there is plenty to laugh at from Jeff being roped into a partnership with a bank teller (Nina Dobrev) who is obsessed with Point Break and turned on by committing crimes to Luke Evans having fun drinking, doing karaoke, and bedding women. But things get decidedly less funny in the second half of the film.
Halfway through The Get Out, the movie takes a distinctly darker turn in tone as the body count piles up. One minute, Russell Crowe is saying, “You don’t bleach Albanian asshole,” and listening to self-help audiobooks, and the next, he is a mean son of a bitch whose mild-mannered exterior shifts to something more akin to the criminals he is surrounded by. The same can be said for Aaron Paul, who shifts from a frustrated lackey with no choice but to commit crimes and stuck with Nina Dobrev’s kooky character to a pair of them dealing with the very real stakes of their actions. The shift in tone is quite jarring and gives The Get Out a disjointed quality that makes you wonder whether there were two very different cuts of the same movie that were accidentally spliced together.
There is nothing inherently bad about The Get Out, but there also isn’t anything glaringly original. We have seen this story plenty of times before, and with better scripts. What helps this movie rise above its screenplay are the performances, especially those of Russell Crowe and Aaron Paul. Filmed in Australia (standing in for Los Angeles), the setting could have been ripe for something funnier or more serious, but this movie cannot decide which way to go. Everyone is doing an American accent, aside from Crowe, who also seems to be having the most fun out of anyone in the cast. Aaron Paul echoes his Breaking Bad character of Jesse as a guy stuck by circumstance, but Nina Dobrev steals the film with her completely bonkers performance. Everyone is good, but they all feel like they are appearing in different movies, and no one really gets the spotlight they deserve. Crowe does manage to have the most rounded arc of anyone, but aside from some opening voice-over narration, the film tries too hard to be an ensemble project.
Director Derrick Borte, who worked with Russell Crowe in the 2020 surprise hit Unhinged, adapted Thomas Perry’s novel Strip. Perry is an award-winning novelist who also penned The Old Man, which was adapted into the FX series starring Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow. While that series kept to Perry’s deadly-serious mystery tone, Borte tries to emulate the works of Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino, and Shane Black, with a pretty on-the-nose reference to Kill Bill popping up early in the film. The Get Out pales in comparison to those films and could have benefited from being closer to The Nice Guys or Get Shorty, which managed to strike a balance between comedy and drama throughout. The Get Out fails to stay consistent with the noir elements, losing steam early before the final act does away with them almost entirely.
Kudos to Russell Crowe for delivering a solid performance when lesser actors and peers would phone it in for the paycheck. Crowe is at his best when he is having fun, and this is one of his most relaxed and likable characters in a long time. With a slight paunch, glasses, and tracksuits, Crowe would be perfect for a Big Lebowski-style take on noir tales rather than mediocre offerings like this. The Get Out is not a terrible movie, but just not a very good one either. Worth seeing on digital if you have nothing else to watch, but don’t expect it to stick around in your memory very long.
The Get Out opens in theaters on June 26th and on digital on June 30th.