Review: The Bag Man

John Cusack plays a courier for mobster Robert De Niro, given an assignment to pick up a bag, take it to a particular hotel and wait in a particular room for it to be picked up. Do not, under any circumstances look in the bag. Various seedy people seem hell bent on targeting Cusack, the hotel manager (Crispin Glover) is a nosey fucker too, and Cusack ends up having to look after a hooker (Rebecca DaCosta) fleeing a creepy pimp. The hooker, by the way, takes a peek inside the bag. Dominic Purcell plays an intimidating local lawman, Sticky Fingaz and Martin Klebba play the nasty pimp and his diminutive associate.

 

I don’t know how respected actors like John Cusack and Robert De Niro ended up in C and D-grade crap in recent years, but I guess the one thing going for this 2014 crime/noir from debut director David Grovic and co-writer Paul Conway (who and co-starred in “L.A., I Hate You” with Rebecca DaCosta and Malcolm McDowell) is that at least this one hit theatres in the US. It was direct-to-DVD here in Australia though, and with good reason. It’s really lousy, dull stuff with frankly uninteresting characters.

 

A slightly pissed off John Cusack is at first an interesting choice, but he becomes less interesting and more unlikeable as the film goes on. I get that his character is mildly irritated by his current job, but after a while he just comes off as a jerk. He’s frankly a little unpleasant to be spending an entire film with. However, it’s really Rebecca DaCosta that annoyed me the most here. She has zero charisma and whoever cast her mistook fluency in English for expressive fluency in English. The girl is completely robotic, and despite a hot bod she has no idea how to be seductive or sultry. She’s frozen solid. These are our leads, people. Yeah, fun times.

 

Crispin Glover turns up as Crispin Glover as a hotel manager, and at first that’s pretty priceless. I mean, is this guy on all the drugs or what? However, Grovic and Conway don’t give him anything interesting to say or do beyond being Crispin Glover, and so he ends up kind of pointless. That said, he’s the most enjoyable thing here, so I’m kinda glad he’s in the film, superfluous or not (Though his line ‘No one touches my wheelchair, Mr. Smith. It belongs to my dead mother’ is a seriously on-the-nose Norman Bates reference). By the time Sticky Fingaz (who is quite good) sporting an eye-patch and diminutive Martin Klebba turn up you start to suspect the whole thing is either meant as a black comedy or a Coen Brothers homage. You also realise that it’s not very good, and casting the very likeable John Cusack doesn’t inherently make his character likeable enough to suffer through. Dominic Purcell still can’t do an American accent for the life of him, but fair cop, he’s pretty intimidating here. As for Robert De Niro, seemingly modelling his appearance on Dustin Hoffman’s Robert Evans impersonation in “Wag the Dog”, anyone could’ve played his character. I mean, you could’ve given it to anyone from Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, Arthur J. Nascarella, James Caan, Joey Pants (Pantoliano), or Robert Davi. De Niro didn’t need to be here at all. This material is beneath him, and I’m sick of saying that about De Niro. As for his performance, he isn’t awful, but he’s not trying awfully hard, either. He does have one awful, over-the-top scene involving a monologue about “Full House” that is just pathetic, one of his worst moments on screen in an otherwise just mediocre performance.

 

Apparently the script is based on a rewrite of a script called “Motel” written by actor James Russo (who you may remember as Axel’s ne’er do well buddy from “Beverly Hills Cop”). That fact is more interesting than the film itself, which is occasionally amusing when Glover and Sticky Fingaz are around, but mostly proves boring, heavy-handed, and Rebecca DaCosta is woefully out of her depth. This is a mess.

 

Rating: C-