Writer Scott Frank's first film as director hinges on an unusually intriguing protagonist. Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a night janitor, befriended by a crook and persuaded to join in a heist from the bank in which he is employed.
It is not perhaps a very original premise. But the janitor is a young man who has survived a terrible car crash and been left with a leaky memory and a lack of confidence in any normal activities that renders him highly vulnerable.
At least half the film is about the way he has to deal with his life. He bunks down with a blind friend (Jeff Daniels), and navigates an almost surreal existence. He becomes easy prey for Matthew Goode's crook, an old school friend who finds him a girl (Isla Fisher) and recruits him only when he has wormed his way into his grateful affections.
The Lookout is a well made psychological thriller which only disappoints with its ending - like that of many other heist movies, it concludes in a welter of blood-soaked violence.
Until then, Gordon-Levitt's acting lifts it into another plain altogether as an examination of the often ignored legacy of accidents on those lucky to be alive and trying to live through a terrible experience.
The Lookout
Cert: 15
