Critics reviews

The American heist movie enjoyed something of a resurgence in 2017 with the releases of LOGAN LUCKY, BABY DRIVER and GOOD TIME. While the first two of these films are enjoyable, comedic, populist entertainments, the Safdie brothers' movie is, by contrast, a trickier, more troubling and ultimately more satisfying thing: a breathlessly paced thriller centered on an unlikable protagonist . . . that continually challenges viewers by making disturbing asides about racism in contemporary America.

Good Time, blanked by the Cannes jury and spruned by late-summer audiences, has filmmaking chops that shame most of this fall's award contenders. The Safdies' typically intrepid sound design amplifies narrative tension while also evoking psychological turmoil that the brilliant performers must occasionally suppress. The cinematography shifts among black light, neons, and sooty nocturnes at no cost to visual coherence.

Good Time is propulsion at all costs. Pattinson is the unstoppable white male. The system supports him without fault, and everything he does can and ultimately will be forgiven in time. We see him as a sleazeball, a racist, a total cockroach, and we know that he'll be given every chance to succeed again and again and again. He has the benefit of the doubt. The fact that the Safdies understand this and wring it for all its worth is one of the most bold and honest moves in all of movies this year.

Pure propulsion. Connie's impromptu solution to the crisis of each moment immediately creates the crisis of the next.

The masterstroke of the script (co-written by Josh with Ronald Bronstein) is how it takes a situation that, in almost any other film of this type, would be played for pathos – Connie's desperate attempt to retrieve a confused Nick from police custody after the latter is arrested following a botched heist – and instead strip-mines it for every last iota of moral ambiguity. Brotherly love isn't a higher calling here; it's a trap that closes in on both siblings in different ways.

The raw energy so often missing from American indie filmmaking of late was back in spades in the Safdie brothers' grimy New York heist thriller Good Time. Far from being overwhelmed or sanitised by Robert Pattinson's reluctant aura of celebrity, the actor succeeded in injecting grit back into his image in a turn that Abel Ferrara would surely have applauded.

Read in this what you will. I have a weakness for stories about self-destructive doofuses, toxic family bonds, and small-time crooks, so naturally I dug the Safdie brothers' grungy Good Time. . . . I'm partial to anything with a mood of itching urgency and to movies that plot themselves into tighter and tighter corners until they flip inside out into some kind of abstracted, claustrophobic representation of the whole.

In its intense focus on the protagonist, the film feels too enraptured with his actions to criticize them. The brilliant aesthetic of Good Time conveys the adrenaline rush Pattinson experiences as he races from one scam to another, the thrill he attains from living outside the law. While I don't believe that art must provide its audience with a moral compass, I do believe that a deliberately amoral perspective ought to guide audiences to greater insight than those Good Time provides.

An intense, fiery, hallucinatory film that's filled with violence but doesn't feature a single gunshot. What blood there is gets shed with pain and depicted with horror. There's a sprinkling of off-kilter comedy and one arc of grand, lofty, classical irony, but the irony never pertains to the violence, about which the Safdies find nothing amusing. The violence isn't aestheticized, prettified, lionized. Rather, it's fast, plain, and sordid.

This is the Safdies' biggest movie, and while the budget allowed them to work with the magnetic and gifted Pattinson and to shoot in an array of complex locations, they also held fast to their guerrilla filmmaking method. The outer boroughs of New York have rarely been shown as realistically and phantasmagorically within a single movie.

Good Time—with its illicit behavior, its misguided characters, and its aggressively digressive storytelling—too often plays like a comedy of errors rather than a tale of true desperation. Its harnessing of a freewheeling energy not often seen in American cinema since the 1970s is undeniably impressive. But for the first time, the Safdies seem to have sold their characters a bit short, letting the sheer wildness of their exploits eclipse what drove them to such extremes in the first place.

Movie bank robberies have grown increasingly technical over the decades: enough blueprints, hardware, sangfroid, and hours in the library researching metals and we could all be Robert De Niro in Heat. Good Time restores the desperation and dirtbag absurdity of the endeavor. The film has room at once for pain and outrageous twists that lend the film an outlaw jocularity.