WhatzUp

Best Laid Plans
by Derek Neff

Bryce (Josh Brolin) calls up his old college buddy Nick (Allesandro Nivola) in the middle of the night to help him clean up a mess. Seems he has just spent a drunken evening with a woman (Reese Witherspoon), and he doesn't remember what exactly occurred between them. However, after she threatened to turn him in for rape, in a panic he tied her up and locked her in a back room of the house he's been hired to house-sit. Now he needs Nick's help in deciding what to do next.

Screenwriter Ted Griffin and director Mike Barker have fashioned a remarkably lean and lucid story out of all of this and have even thrown in several narrative curve-balls along the way. Newcomer Nivola has undeniable presence as the morally-conflicted Nick, and Witherspoon's trademark wit is also much in evidence here. (The only weak link in this otherwise impressive cast is Josh Brolin, who seems stiff and uncomfortable, and who shouts out every line to compensate.) Best Laid Plans even managed to surprise this film noir buff at the end, not by cynically revealing that every relationship in the movie is just all part of an elaborate con, but by refreshingly failing to do so. That must be breaking some noir rule or other.