“I flew fifty-seven missions in Korea and I was drunk every damn time.”
Though his area of expertise is grand theft auto, Jack Friar (Samuel L. Jackson) finds himself roped into a missing persons case when his neighbor comes to him in tears. Knowing that the official channels are backlogged, he postpones his plans to play cello with Yo-yo Ma and takes it upon himself to track down a girl and her boyfriend off the record.
It’s while going door to door with a photograph of the couple that Jack meets Mrs. Quarre (Grace Zabriskie), a friendly senior citizen who welcomes him into her home, introduces him to her husband (Joss Ackland), and demands that he stay for tea. When he realizes that he’s lost the picture, he begins to describe the man he’s after to the Quarres. That’s when a character who fits the basic physical description steps out of the shadows and puts a gun to his head. But hot-tempered Hoop (Doug Hutchison) is not the suspect that Jack is after. Rather, he’s part of a dysfunctional criminal operation that includes the Quarres and is headed by the fiendish Tyrone (Stellan Skarsgård). And so Jack finds himself bound to a chair while his kidnappers use tech-savvy to execute an absurd heist.
While the two men infiltrate the bank and the Quarres head to the airfield, Jack is watched over by Erin (Milla Jovovich), a femme fatale who has promised herself to every man involved in the scheme, bar the ancient Mr. Quarre and including the banker (Jonathan Higgins) who is aiding the thieves. Once they spend some time alone and Erin rescues Jack from a diabetic coma, the two quickly warm to one another and bond over their shared love of music. Improbably, while Jack lies unconscious, Erin drives to his home to retrieve his insulin and his cello, and soon he, too, is caught up in her manipulations.
A paragon of mixed bags, Bob Rafelson’s No Good Deed is equal parts clever black comedy, creaky plotting, and weak psychodrama. It works best when Zabriskie and Ackland are in the picture as they provide much-needed levity with their banter, and worst when its overly contrived plot is presented with sincerity. The primary point of failure is that the Dashiell Hammett short story (“The House on Turk Street”) that serves as its source material was simply too short, and it’s been stretched mercilessly thin to buff out the runtime to feature length. This distended quality regularly undercuts any tension that is momentarily generated. The secondary failure is the unpleasant mishmash of tones. For my money, the quirkiness worked while the romance and constant feints and double-crossing felt lightweight. To wit, I enjoyed Tyrone’s constant ridicule of Hoop (“Was it the Bell of Tacos or the King of Burgers which had most recently rejected your services?”) and the scene where Hoop inexplicably makes himself a ketchup sandwich. By contrast, the centerpiece scene, in which Erin sits on Jack’s lap as he guides her hands through an intimate cello lesson, is completely flat. Likewise the heist. Likewise the betrayals.
A serviceable thriller, I guess, but considering the assembly of talent involved in its making, No Good Deed is a letdown.