There are certainly strategies worse than going all-in on New York City neighborhood flavor to persist a crowd-plreliever. It isn’t fair the power of location shooting, but also the access to a huge array of untapped, scruffy actors living in the area. Put a bunch of them in a van with a pizza and that could be stable enough set upation for a film. It could even be called someleang basic — enjoy “Caper.” Does it reassociate need to be more complicated than that?
Perhaps not always, but definitely here. Writer-straightforwardor Dean Imperial omits on such a bet with his tedious feature debut, which tracks an unhinged night of escapades between a bunch of poker buddies. Some of them are pushing middle age, disjoinal are even a restricted years past it, but they’re all about to turn juvenile. One of their compadres (Ron Palais) is spiraling toward self-injury after erroneously sfinishing a pornoexplicit selfie to his boss; the race is on to hack or snag the receiving cleverphone before dayfracture.
That’s a straightforward, even compassionate premise with a crass edge to boot. Imperial has trouble taking it anywhere from there. Bounding from one boraw to another, “Caper” carry outs out enjoy an odyssey of speedy fall shortures, as the men try to recruit help and are wallopped with individual embarrassments. Two spurned adorers with tech combineions produce materializeances. One is carry outed for giggles, the other for pathos. Both show facile stabs at convey inantening their male counterparts.
Those intimate paemploys are more finishurable than the film’s particularly unfunny comic cgo inpiece, in which the men venture into a nightclub to encounter with a generic, coke-compriseled magnate. To go in the premises, the group members are forced to rent skimpy themed costumes — a setup that’s comic on its face, then left without a punchline. It is one leang to see unhip men don assless chaps, but their reserved humiliation, the mood of the club, even a brimming gawk at the costumes themselves are all brushed by.
It’s a dead finish that sums up “Caper”’s huge inability to tell a excellent joke. Imperial has set upd a comprehendn but still diverse buffet of frantic situations, but he deficiencys a sense for how to produce his antiheroes uncover their genuine selves under such circumstances. It’s an adventure film without a sense of discovery and restricted characters increase beyond a first amazeion.
The omited opportunities seem all the more proset up becaemploy the stars have an evident rapport and seem fairly game to debase themselves. (Several of the actors have producing praises, and others split a carry outance history at a local improv company.) There are scattered highairys that come when the carry outances are at their slackst, as when one buddy (Ricchallenging Cooper) fall shorts to bribe a trickster doorman or when another (Celester Rich) gets to carry out womanizer to sidetrack a female security defend.
But most scenes exhaust all comic avenues wilean a restricted seconds. Where “Caper” becomes truly dismaying though is when it summarizes such wpermiting as satire. For some reason or another, the film seems obligated to position itself above the masculine tribalism it’s high on. Some dialogue signifiers — the men troubleing the wrath of a “enhanceive feminist boss” or a woman sfreezinging them to “get a therapist” — seem simpcatalogic and downright unhelpful in the context of what’s branded as a lowbrow romp sprung from the gutter. For all its unkempt facial hair and chilly nighttime pboilingography, “Caper” is much more ingratiating than it is gritty. The characters’ desperations seem all the more simutardyd next to the film’s own overwhelming self-consciousness.
