Butler's Cinema Scene

Travis Fimmell

“FINDING STEVE McQUEEN”  My rating: C+

108 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Give the makers of “Finding Steve McQueen” credit for at least shaking up the parameters of your standard heist movie.

For starters, this fact-based caper film about the biggest bank haul in U.S. history is thick with comic overtones thanks to a doofus of a leading man and a goofy gang of miscreants.

For another, it employs a scrambled narrative that hopscotches back and forth in time.

“Finding Steve…” centers on Harry Barber, a minor participant in the event but the only one still around to tell the tale.

Mark Steven Johnson’s film begins with Harry (Travis Fimmel) in the present (actually the early ’80s). He’s agitated. All worked up. Hearing his panicked confession, his girl Molly (Rachael Taylor) — the daughter of a local cop —  freaks out when she realizes the man she’s loved for several years isn’t who he said he was.

He is, in fact, the last free member of a notorious gang, and now his time is running out.

Then we flash back to Ohio in 1972.  Harry — who so worships the films of Steve McQueen that he sports “Bullitt”-ish sunglasses, a blond ‘do and tools around in muscle cars — does jobs for his uncle Enzo (William Fichtner), a veteran thief. Enzo has somehow learned that in a safe deposit box in a little nondescript bank in California there sits millions of dollars in a secret (and illegal) slush fund for President Richard Nixon. (This is true.)

Nixon-hater Enzo decides to rip off Tricky Dick…and posits that since the money is dirty the administration will probably not want to publicize the crime or make too big an effort to identify the perps.

Louis Lombardo, Ghys Coiro, Travis Fimmel, William Fichtner

Ken Hixon and Keith Sharon’s screenplay shifts among several times and places. There’s the heist, which unfolds over a long weekend while the bank is closed (it involves drilling down through the roof into the vault). There’s the post-crime investigation by a couple of FBI agents (Forest Whitaker, Lily Rabe).

And we keep returning to Harry and Molly in the present, as they prepare for the legal axe that’s about to fall on him.

The film’s high points are the interactions between the gang members, a bunch of good ol’ bozos who like to talk tough and bitch loudly (in addition to Fimmel and Fichtner they’re played by Louis Lombardi, Rhys Coiro and Jake Weary). Particularly amusing is how quickly these Midwestern goombahs glom onto the easygoing California lifestyle (hot tubs!!!).

The film’s main tripping point is its leading man.  Himmel — he’s a regular on the History Channel’s “Vikings” — can’t quite get a handle on Harry Barber. Is this guy only a preening moron? Does he have any real depth?  And when agitated why does he look like somebody who accidentally ingested a habanero pepper?

Johnson’s direction exists in a sort of no man’s land between comedy and drama…it never comes down hard enough on either to really register.

But as a footnote to modern political/crime history, “Finding Steve McQueen” is intriguing.

| Robert W. Butler