Like Vaseline on a doorknob, the well-groomed Canadian heist movie Foolproof is slick, transparent and hard to hang on to. Two weeks after seeing it, it may require psychiatric digging just to recover its buried memory.
The fruit of the latest bureaucracy-induced strategy to "cure" the Canadian film industry of its commercial anemia -- strategies which omit "curing" the Canadian film industry of its bureaucrats -- Foolproof is as deliberately impersonal, bland and glibly implausible as any movie you'll catch slipping through the megaplex.
If there's any residual impression left by this overdressed TV pilot about three nice-looking, cyber-chic hobby-hackers (Ryan Reynolds, Kristin Booth and Joris Jarsky) who are blackmailed by a diabolical restaurateur (a heavy-breathing David Suchet) into executing a real heist, it's the impression that you've seen it all before.
Last year's fix-it Canadian movie Men With Brooms aimed to harpoon the elusive box office behemoth by wrapping itself in designer flannel. Foolproof opts for mousse and black leather.
The brier-themed romantic comedy played up the proudly self-deprecating hoser archetype of Canadian pop culture, but Foolproof opts for its needier, aspiring hip urban counterpart. This is the movie equivalent of all those heavily promoted, Canadian-produced, limited lifespan TV shows featuring attractive people doing daring things in big cities at night.
Even the city called Toronto only appears as its generic movie and TV counterpart, a strangely depopulated place of glass, condos, atriums, sport coupes and night-slick streets that must be frequently named as Toronto because it would otherwise feel like what it's customarily called to impersonate, which is nowhere in particular.
And if Toronto in Foolproof looks and feels like nowhere in particular, it's at least populated by life forms organic to this anonymity. Neither of the movie's trio of virtual thieves -- video-gaming equivalents of teases, they meticulously plan heists but never carry them out -- manages to suggest anything even faintly resembling an offscreen life. With each shot, they look as if they've sprung straight from the gym or wardrobe trailer. Explanation is neither given nor required for everyone's ludicrously overdeveloped expertise in matters of high-tech espionage, martial arts or high-altitude stuntwork, and the nouvelle cusine bad guy raises nary an eyebrow hair. Even the movie's dramatically overworked subject -- a heist! -- seems calculated to ensure an airtight superficiality.
A step up from fashion models, Foolproof's Bod Squad would seem to exist only between the calls of "action!" and "cut!," and even then only as mannequin knockoffs of TV-familiar types. When one of them refers to their play-heisting club back in college, the mere mention of a prior existence floods the skull with impertinent queries: Just what did these airbrushed hotties study in college. Bone structure and martial arts? Elevator shaft dangling? And did they hang out with others just like them? Say, people majoring in "attitude and abdominal development"?
In the same way that the plastic-wrapped characters and environment insulates Foolproof -- the very title of which evokes less a movie than a marketing strategy -- from the intrusion of anything like real life, it also undermines any possible suspense. These guys are too cute and hip to ever do anything as lame as fail. And that villain: with his velvety Brit accent, poncey restaurant and bald middle-aged head, can there really be any question? But that's the TV-think again: You never kill anyone you want to return for another episode.
Invariably, heist movies are about a single question: will they get away with it? And so it is with the unabashedly inconsequential, made-in-Canada popcorn-accessory movie Foolproof. Only you don't wonder about the characters, since their success is practically branded onto their jeans.
Film Notes:
Directed by: William Phillips
Starring: Ryan Reynolds (Kevin), Kristin Booth (Sam), Joris Jarsky (Rob), Tara Slone (Maggie), William House (Stanley O. Hamish), Wai Choy (Harry), David Suchet (Leo Gillette), David Hewlett (Lawrence Yeager)
Running time: 94 minutes
Taiwan Release: Today
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