Sometimes, you just need to find a way to filter out the anger. This is the premise that Derrick Borte chooses as the starting point for The Get Out (otherwise known as Bear Country in some markets), an adaptation of the novel Strip by Thomas Perry, in which we are introduced to Manco Kapak, an Albanian immigrant who has called the United States his home for decades, long enough that he has started a successful life as a nightclub owner, running a former strip club and turning it into a more legitimate operation – or at least that’s the illusion he would like to convey, since the same questionable activities are going on behind closed doors that he does wish fewer people knew about. On a particularly eventful week, Manco finds himself having to fend off pressure from multiple places, including running afoul over a violent gang leader after a drug deal gone wrong, being pursued by an anxious university professor who decides to become an armed robber, and having to endure the usual song-and-dance that comes with existing around the edges of the underground, especially when he is constantly interacting with law enforcement, who know this game all too well. The Get Out has a lot of potential, and certainly is telling a captivating story in some ways – but for whatever reason, instead of being the cohesive and engaging blend of crime thriller and dark comedy, it instead feels like a few different films thrown into a blender, and where the final product is just the least interesting remnants of each, rather than an assemblage of all of their best qualities. I’ve never embraced films that only exist while riding on the coattails of other better works, and The Get Out is a perfect example of this in practice – dull and vapid for the most part, and where not even decent performances and a good sense of humour are ultimately enough to do anything particularly memorable with this one-dimensional premise that either needed a different approach or a better filmmaker to bring this promising idea to life.

The connective tissue that binds this film together is the subject of the American Dream, which is the ideological centre around which the entire story is constructed. The character of Manco embodies the quintessential version of what it means to succeed: a penniless immigrant who came to the country to seek a better life for himself, and has spent decades not only building wealth, but also the status and influence that often accompany it. The idea of someone from the former Yugoslavia going into the nightclub business, while cliched, does hammer in the point of having a visible metric of his success, as well as his integration into society in a natural way. The Get Out presents success as something that is volatile and requires constant negotiation and compromise, which is where the central tension emerges, almost as if the message of this film is that it’s simply not enough to achieve the American Dream, but rather one has to maintain it as much as they can. This springs some fascinating observations, such as how Manco has needed to turn his nightclub into what appears to be a more respectable establishment (reflecting the idea of leaving the past behind) while still engaging in some light criminal activity, even if it is only by proxy, indicating his legitimacy is a performative gesture designed to keep him in control, regardless of what occurs around him. The film presents crime as an ecosystem, with the intersecting stories of different people engaged in a range of criminal enterprises creating a vibrant tapestry of immoral behaviour, an interconnected network of gangsters and business owners on one side of the moral spectrum, and the police officers and civilians who both directly and inadvertently support them. Through the story of a man facing pressure from every direction and teetering dangerously close on collapse, the film explores quite an interesting premise, showing the intersecting challenges faced by the protagonist, who discovers that his responsibilities extend beyond simple running a nightclub, and instead requires him to balace criminal obligations, business concerts, personal relationship and his own declining sanity, which does make for an entertaining film, albeit one that does eventually prove to be a bit more hollow.

The best way to describe The Get Out would be as if someone took every crime thriller made in the past couple of decades, and fed them into a machine that would subsequently produce a script for the most trite, obvious combination of cliches imaginable. This film feels less like a cohesive story and more like what someone would expect to be a parody of the entire genre. I don’t even think we can attribute this to any intentional attempt at comedy, since while it does have some humour embedded in it (which also happens to be the only aspect of the film that works), it is still very pale and not at all purposeful. Structurally, the film leaves a lot to be desired – it introduces multiple converging storylines, but never develops them enough to actually create meaningful tension or intrigue, and there’s an overt reliance on genre archetypes, with every character seemingly being plucked directly from the most obvious, entry-level guide on neo-noir conventions, which does mean that no one feels all that authentic, and simply exist as pawns to pander to the crime thriller aspects of the story. There’s also very little suspense, primarily because the film lacks a consistent, meaningful villain – the various adversaries confronted by the protagonist are fun, but they don’t have any substance and feel like they are just the product of a screenplay following the safest and most obvious narrative beats. Tonally, the film oscillates between a gritty crime drama and a stark deadpan comedy, but never finds the right balance between the two, actively straining to get in some jokes wherever possible, leading to a disjoined script that doesn’t really seem all that impressive, especially since the plot is nothing particularly unique and the dialogue frequently sounds as if it is imitating other crime films rather than having a distinctive voice of its own. Borte rarely finds the opportunity to inject any personal style into the material, making every scene just feel functional to the story rather than particularly cinematic in any meaningful way. Ultimately, this just becomes a film that isn’t necessarily incompetent but rather frustratingly generic, being more than content to just recycle conventions rather than finding a fresh angle to anything being discussed throughout the story.

There is an argument that The Get Out only exists to give Borte another opportunity to work with Russell Crowe, with whom he had collaborated in Unhinged, a film that didn’t leave too much of an impression but has steadily developed a dedicated cult following. There are many problems with this film, but Crowe is not one of them, solely because he does exactly what he was hired to do. If anything, we can appreciate how he’s decided that this point in his career is going to be spent having fun, and it’s been a delight to see him lean into the fact that he’s older and more burly than he was during his youth, which may mean that he’s maybe not capable of the physicality from his younger years, but that has now been replaced with the ability to play an entirely new group of characters. As the Albanian nightclub owner on the other side of middle age, Crowe is having an absolute blast – his accent work is predictably very broad and lacking in specificity (he does the closest approximation to a general Balkan accent, which is fitting considering the film doesn’t really make any effort to be authentic), but he’s still managing to sell absolutely every moment of this film, which requires someone willing to take a gamble throughout. It’s a very fun performance, but not one that tends to be all that memorable, and considering he’s at the stage in his career where he seems to be accepting everything that comes his way, this isn’t at all an essential performance. However, he’s at least very good, and the same sadly cannot be said for the rest of the cast – Aaron Paul is wickedly miscast as what is supposed to be an urbane young professor, but who instead comes across as a skittish, confusing attempt at giving the film a villain. Luke Evans has all of his usual charisma stripped away in the part of a federal agent who exists primarily as the voice of reason for the protagonist, and Daniel Zovatto (a very promising actor) does not have all that much to do throughout the film, all of this ultimately leading to a film that lacks specificity and feels like it never really makes much use of the cast outside of Crowe, around whom the story is constructed.

A fully-committed central performance from Crowe and a general desire to please the viewer is admirable, but its ultimately not enough to conceal the fact that The Get Out is a bit of a misfire, a film that seems like every convention of the crime thriller genre was compressed into a single 100-minute and we are left to pick and choose the aspects that speak to us the most, with very little guidance in terms of what it all means. This is a film where craftsmanship is replaced with the prioritisation of familiarity, under the assumption that audiences will more readily respond to something that plays into genre conventions rather than challenging or reworking them for its own purpose. It has very entertaining moments (almost all of which come on behalf of Crowe, who is clearly enjoying himself playing this larger-than-life character), but it ultimately struggles to find any distinctive perspective on the material, leaving this feeling far more anonymous than it ought to have been. The premise has some intriguing observations around immigration, the pursuit of success and the fragility of the American Dream, but these ideas are never explored with nearly enough depth or nuance to elevate the film beyond standard crime thriller fare. The constant hinting at moral complexity present in the screenplay is betrayed by its own inability to actually see the purpose behind this material, becoming a predictable and overly dramatic affair when it clearly should have aspired to be more ambitious. Very little momentum is built (especially from the intersecting storylines, which begin to dilute one another), leading to a by-the-numbers climax in which nothing much is actually said. The Get Out is the kind of film that is generally quite entertaining, but which evaporates the moment it ends, the result being a competent but disappointingly generic thriller that never once justifies why this story needed to be told.