Critics reviews

Weapons are brandished but rarely deployed in Lynn Shelton’s “Sword of Trust,” a smart, politically barbed comedy about truthiness and consequences... [but] At times the movie seems content to substitute bumbling comedy for deeper insight, and its prodding at politics doesn’t have enough follow-through...

Shelton offers the characters a deft shading of backstory that puts the entire plot into high relief and situates it in a wide, complex, and varied civic landscape.

For the most part, the acting and the characters carry the day.

If ever there were a movie for our era, it is surely Lynn Shelton’s deceptively low-fi comedy “Sword of Trust,” which cheerfully skewers its targets even as it sweetly wears its heart on its sleeve.

Sword of Trust is a modest, wobbly picture, and it falls apart as it rambles toward its ending. Yet it never feels like a waste of time. Sometimes being invited along for the ride is reward enough.

The humor has a persistent goofy streak, but what sticks to the ribs is the poignant stuff.

As with her 2009 movie Humpday, a daring variation on straight bromance movies that doesn’t have the courage to take things to their logical conclusion, there’s a sense that lots of genuinely interesting material is being left on the table.

When it’s based in character, Sword of Trust is stellar. But as it rumbles into a third act more ambitious than Shelton’s other films, things get a bit clunky... Shelton gathered together a terrific ensemble, and it’s a joy to watch them play within her and O’Brien’s offbeat world of conspiracy theories and lovable losers. In the end, Sword of Trust is rich with humor and heart with a sophisticated edge of snark.

An engaging tension between tone and theme animates the film, but you may wish that Shelton had approached her material with more focus.

Making the most of her exceptional cast, who are largely improving around a script written by Shelton and Mike O’Brien, this drama about a group of stranger all looking to profit from a valuable civil war artifact is easy, breezy entertainment.

“Sword of Trust” is pleasant and unfussy in its packaging, with all focus securely placed on the excellent cast. Though there’s an inevitable meandering quality to this kind of exercise, with scenes mostly improvised within Shelton and Mike O’Brien’s scripted framework, Tyler L. Cook’s editing feels very alert.

There are minor beats in “Sword of Trust” that feel completely genuine, and... a lot of the film was improvised. The awkward stutters in an early scene between Maron and Shelton herself as a former lover of Maron’s have a ring of truth that the film lacks whenever the plot kicks back in. I loved so many of those minor beats in “Sword of Trust” that I felt all the more frustrated when the major ones didn’t work.