The plot centers around a young man named Chris Pratt. Chris is a typical man, and a hockey all star in a small town in Kansas. Things seem good and fine in Chris’s world until a car crash leaves Chris with a head injury that causes Chris to have to relearn every aspect of his life.
Chris is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Third Rock From The Sun), and is supported by Jeff Daniels (Dumb & Dumber). The entire cast does an amazing job in this film of setting up the sequence of events while showing that they aren’t complete stereotypes. The commentary suggests that the characters were written one way, but the actors playing them were given a lot of creative license to take them in a direction that made them more three dimensional. Instead of a stereotypical evil villain, you are left with a guy that has grand ideas and horrible execution. Yes he is evil, but in a way that can be sympathized with.
Writer Scott Frank is also the director of this movie. Although it is his directing debut, he does a fantastic job of helping transform his vision to the big screen. Each scene looks beautiful, and as you watch this movie you get the feeling that you are a part of Chris’s life as he moves from day to day struggling with his disability.
“The Lookout” has something that a lot of American movies just don’t have… a compelling story. I actually cared about Chris, and I actually felt his pain when he struggled to adapt to his life after the accident.
This movie was fantastic in it’s subtlety as well. Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t overact the character of Chris as some goober mental patient which has become stereotyped as the person with a brain injury. Instead, he helped show that a person with that handicap can still look and function much like the rest of us with some difficulty in daily tasks that many people normally do not have. You can see this in the way he holds things, and hear it in his speech when you listen to him monologue.
I think that you can tell a great movie from a good movie by it’s ability to elicit within the viewer an emotional response. If you can somehow identify with a character, or feel what the character feels as the plot progresses then the movie has told a story the right way. I think that “The Lookout” does that well. While it’s not epic, and it’s not among my ten favorite all time movies, it’s certainly entertaining, and certainly a great movie.
Presentation and Value
“The Lookout” DVD is presented in a fairly typical way. You get a disc in a standard black DVD case with a few irrelevant inserts, nothing special.
It almost makes me sad how simple this DVD is, because it has the potential to be marketed much more creatively (think Memento). The presentation of this movie translated to DVD makes it feel cheaper, and takes away from a good film.
The special features in this DVD are almost non-existent. Since it didn’t have a huge theatrical turnout, I believe the rush to DVD didn’t emphasize much effort beyond a single documentary about production cut into two clips. The “bonus features” feel like a mere afterthought rather than content that can truly be enjoyed by fans of this film.
There are three special features on this disc. First we get, “Sequencing the Lookout”, a making-of featurette in which the writer/director and a handful of the actors from this film give their insights into the production of “The Lookout”.
After that, you get a second featurette with clips that appear to be from the same interviews, this time looking into the mind of Chris Pratt, and examining the struggles that Chris faces in his new life.
Finally, like every DVD, you have the option of watching the entire movie again with commentary. This almost shouldn’t be counted as a special feature, since almost every movie made has commentary available these days.
The features (minus commentary) took me all of about half an hour to watch in full, and just left me wanting more. The movie was fantastic, but the presentation was lacking. I would liken this experience to a really tasty meal in a really crappy diner.
