Roofman

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Roofman is a biographical feature about Jeffrey Manchester, dubbed the 'Roofman' due to his criminal activities of breaking into McDonald's through drilling into their roof spaces. After a prison escape, Jeffrey laid low in a Toy R' Us for months, assuming a new identity and starting to build a new life.

This movie is often quite tragic; you can't help but feel a lot of empathy for the misfortune that Jeffrey finds himself in. This is a protagonist who seems to want the right thing, but keeps picking the wrong path and making ill-fated choices. In a concept sense, this film manages the underdog, everyman story presentation well. The best part of this film is how it manages to present the novelty of Jeffrey living in the Toys R' Us store, which is a pretty wild thing. Seeing Jeffrey zoom around on heelies, wearing Spider-Man clothing while taking a baseball bat to Cuddle-Me Elmos is quite entertaining.

I quite liked the soundtrack for this film; it grounded us in that late 90s/early 2000s era nicely, and there were moments like the 'Don't Speak' by No Doubt scene that had me cracking up.

Channing Tatum, who played Jeffrey Manchester, does a perfectly decent job as this bad luck thief; Tatum's strength is his efforts to be charming and relatable. Kirsten Dunst, who played Leigh Wainscott, is someone I really felt like I could bump into on the street; watching her small moments of inner conflict in this film shows you what a seasoned performer Dunst is. Lily Collias, who played Lindsay, does a good job as the rebellious teenage daughter of Dunst; the pair push one another in a way that feels quite authentic.

However, the best performance came from Peter Dinklage, who played Mitch. This character is the manager of Toys R' Us, and the sort of jerk manager we all talk about on a lunch break. You can tell Dinklage is having fun being his worst self, taking some truly mean dialogue and getting quite derisive with it. This is a role that goes around and ruins other people's day; he lacks empathy and is entirely self-absorbed. Yet, he also knows how to play his role for comedy, too. Dinklage stumbling onto a naked Tatum is a high point of the film, and I loved how he played the robbery scene, too. Maybe not the biggest role for Dinklage, but an entertaining time from start to finish.

Roofman is a hard film to buy into, I found. This is a film where Jeffrey is almost always being painted as having a heart of gold; he's not so bad, really, he wants to be better, gosh, he sure is trying, isn't he? Yet, if you hang around for the credits and get the real-life interview component, it becomes clear that this is probably a bit of an act; the real Jeffrey was quite manipulative and didn't have much remorse for his actions. The film really doesn't feel very authentic. I didn't believe Jeffrey's story was the heroic underdog tale we were being presented with. This is the sort of film that gives you the warm fuzzies at the end, and makes you a bit sad for our hapless hero. But the story we have here is almost like an Instagram filter over the truth. Presented pretty, but quite fictitious. There's so much absurdity in the moments of criminal exploits, massage parlour Buddhas and passport wig canvassing that it all winds up feeling very sincere. The moment the church comes into play in this plot, there's almost a moment of true moral calling applied to Jeffrey that also seems like quite a stretch to me. As a whole, I found this film wanted to be a flashy version of what is quite an intriguing story, but it was willing to compromise on the truth a lot to do so. 

Roofman feels like no effort went into crafting a movie that felt visually interesting. A lot of the camera work is quite basic, and there are many scenes in which the framing is downright ghastly. I wish the director had never gone for a style where the camera got close to the characters, because the camerawork here is glaringly poor. The film has a sluggish pace set by very simplistic editing. I also found the score for this film to be a grating affair; it just drones and doesn't have much emotion to add to this story. The music choices made within the score puzzled me, because this film was hardly asking for much.

Alissa Marie Pearson, who played Becky, is a pretty simple performance for this age; Pearson reads her lines well enough, but there's no sincere connection between her and Tatum. LaKeith Stanfield, who played Steve, rarely feels like a real person; Stanfield plays a hard-edged criminal type, but I struggled to believe in this performance. Melonie Diaz, who played Talena, felt like she had no pre-existing relationship with Tatum or her on-screen children; Diaz is placed in her scenes, but she doesn't really step up as a character actress. Juno Temple, who played Michelle, is a performance with no substance at all; this character plays around a bit in the wig scene, otherwise Temple has nothing to contribute here. Uzo Aduba and Ben Mendelsohn, who played Eileen and Pator Ron respectively, are decent performers playing background characters; it is entirely surprising watching Mendelsohn get lost in this. Kennedy Moyer, who played Dee, is another young actress without much to her; Moyer is just here to be exuberant and not much more.

Has a strange, everyday heart of gold veneer that never truly feels sincere. I would give Roofman a 4.5/10.