"MOVIE MAD" by Michael van den Bos

Timothy Olyphant as Dick in HIGH LIFE

HIGH LIFE - directed by Gary Yates

HIGH LIFE is a new Canadian caper comedy set in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1983 about four young criminal drug addicts who band together to steal money from those newfangled ATMs that have suddenly sprung up around the chilly city.  This being a somewhat conventionally plotted caper story, the envisioned "perfect crime" predictably gets as fried as the brains of the controlled substance abusers attempting to pull off the idiotic heist.  Given that Canadian's are well known for smart, dry, black humour, director Gary Yates and writer Lee MacDougall (basing the film on his play) have made a stoner/crime film that is less black comedy in tone and more the shade of a Winnipeg winter sky, drab and gray.  There are some mildly amusing moments in HIGH LIFE, but it feels as morphine addled as the main characters.

Timothy Olyphant is Dick, a once aspiring lawyer who has served time in prison (inside he was known as "The Counsellor") and is now sweeping floors in a Winnipeg hospital.  Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre), a fellow criminal friend and certifiable psychopath just released from prison, visits Dick and manages get him fired from his job when they are caught stealing hypodermic needles.  Down and out and very broke, Dick schemes a plan to rob his local bank's Automated Teller Machines.  He pulls together a doped-up crime ring consisting of Bug; Donnie (Joe Anderson), a hypochondriac pickpocket; and Billy (Rossif Sutherland), a charming pretty boy who will be the front-man for the caper.  Too much drugs, ill planning, a corrupt bank teller and Bug going ballistic throws the caper into the crapper with the foursome scrambling around Winnipeg to the rockin' tunes of April Wine.

Stephen Eric McIntyre's dead-on dangerous and viciously funny performance as the April Wine loving Bug is the only genuine spark in this commonplace story.  Joe Anderson's nervous and paranoid Donnie and Rossif Sutherland's overconfident and narcissistic Billy give the team a kind of goofy yin and yang.  However, lead actor Timothy Olyphant as Dick, the roasted ringleader of the high heisters, is way too vapid.  When he should be reacting with a nervous anxiety to the unravelling circumstances, he plays the role as if his character is bummed out from running out of rolling papers.  And the fact that his character uses morphine is no excuse for Olyphant's flaccid performance that squelches any potential interest and sympathy from the audience.

HIGH LIFE does contain a few laughs - particularly in the third act involving an armoured car, Donnie, his security guard cousin and a jackhammer wielding Bug - but the humour is mostly of the soft chuckle variety.  The most disconcerting aspect about the film is in its construct; the movie is an uneasy mix of Martin Scorsese's GOODFELLAS (1990) and Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS (1992).  Director Yates goes so far as to blatantly reference the opening freeze frame and voice-over introduction of gangster Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS for HIGH LIFE'S introduction of Dick.  What begins as perhaps an affectionate low-life variant on Scorsese's brilliant gangster film is just the tip of the gun barrel in HIGH LIFE'S too heavy evocation of  not only GOODFELLAS, but of Tarantino's unique stylistic twist on the caper film.  Sure, RESERVOIR DOGS is influenced by Hollywood Golden Age director Howard Hawks's recurring theme of a group of professional men whose relationship to one another is defined by working at a common goal (you see this in PULP FICTION and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, too) and from such classic caper films as John Huston's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950) and, most emphatically, from Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING (1956).  But Tarantino distills these themes and story conventions into highly flammable revisionist cinema.  HIGH LIFE has none of the genre spinning savvy or savage ironic wit of Tarantino, let alone the cinematic brio of Scorsese.

In one drawn out sequence from HIGH LIFE, the four would-be ATM robbers sit nervously in a car parked outside of the bank as a police officer sits in his cruiser a few feet from the boys.  The panicky, syncopated bickering of the boys suggests a Tarantino moment, but it lacks the barbarous and piquant poetic banter that is a Tarantino trademark. 

HIGH LIFE wants to be a giddy and subversive dark crime comedy, but what you get is a mild buzz, not a euphoric high.