Cinema Short Takes: Out of Sight

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Out Of Sight is another fine mess Elmore Leonard has got us into. Basically it's about a congenital bank robber named Jack Foley (George Clooney) who, in the course of a jailbreak, meets and falls into unlikely love with a U.S. marshal named Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez). He's the kind of guy who works unarmed except for his gift of smooth gab. She's the kind of girl whose idea of a nice present from her dad is a new pistol. (The actors are terrific and sexy together.)

There are enough complications in this relationship to fill a book--or a screenplay. But for Leonard and his smart adapters--director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank--that's just a promising beginning. There's a tricky diamond heist to be not quite perpetrated and many wild cards to be dealt into surprising, plausible play. Notable jokers in this deck include Ving Rhames and Steve Zahn as Foley's accomplices--the former prone to careless confession, the latter a blitzed former hippie not sharp enough for the criminal life--and a comically menacing Don Cheadle making Albert Brooks' white-collar jailbird understandably nervous.

What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world.

--By Richard Schickel