“SOUTH OF HEAVEN” My rating: C (Glenwood Arts and VOD)
120 minutes | No MPAA rating
Thanks to the awards magnet known as “Ted Lasso,” 2021 is going down as Jason Sudeikis’ year. Not even a misstep like “South of Heaven” will change that.
What we’ve got here is a multiple-personality crime yarn about an ex-con who gets caught up in ugly (and wildly improbable) events.
We first meet Jimmy (the KC-reared Sudeikis) at his parole hearing in a Texas prison. He tells the board that after serving 12 years of a 15-year sentence for bank robbery, he’s ready to return home and nurse his childhood sweetheart, who is dying of cancer.
“Lasso” fans may be struck with deja vu. Jimmy has more than a little in common with the Kansas-bred coach. There’s no ‘stache, but he shares with Ted a laconic nice-guyness and an innate sweetness. (In fact, Jimmy seems way too copacetic to be a career crook; eventually we’ll learn that the botched bank job was his only foray into crime.)
Moreover, both characters have that aw-shucks Midwestern way of talking. The big difference is that Ted is bent on amusing us, what with all his witty literary and cultural namedropping. Jimmy, on the other hand, isn’t deliberately funny and doesn’t have all that much to say.
Initially Aharon Keshales’ film (co-written with Kai Mark and Navot Papushado) presents itself as a tear-jerking love story. The paroled Jimmy returns to his gal Annie (Evangeline Lilly with a blond pixie cut); he’s devoted to making her last months count.
But staying straight ain’t easy. Jimmy’s parole officer, Schmidt (Shea Whigham, a fine actor here shamelessly overacting), is a creep who threatens to send Jimmy back to prison if he doesn’t serve as a mule in Schmidt’s mini crime syndicate.
On Schmidt’s behalf our reluctant hero finds himself running afoul of both a Hispanic drug lord (Amaury Nolasco) and an African-American gangster (Mike Colter). (Why are the heavies minorities? Just curious.) At one point the latter kidnaps Annie because he believes Jimmy has made off with a half million of his ill-gotten gains.
A desperate Jimmy responds by snatching the gangster’s entitled tweener son (Thaddeus J. Mixson).
Yeah, there’s way too much plot here, all of it ending in a most unromantic blood bath.
The screenplay alternates between moments of ghastly violence and sadism and genuinely thoughtful interludes, like the odd friendships that develops between Annie and the gangster and Jimmy and the gangster’s kid.
If Jimmy seems a sort of dry run for Ted Lasso, Colter’s erudite gangster is a reprise of his recurring character in TV’s “The Good Wife.”
Sudeikis gives it the old college try, but I so love his gentle comedy that I felt like he was playing an ex-con in an “SNL” skit…you know, just a second away from donning a silly track suit and doing a goofy dance. It’s hard work reconciling the actor’s affable essence with the avenging angel he becomes in the last reel — like watching Mary Poppins mutate into Steven Segal.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 