In 1998, former US Army paratrooper Jeffrey Manchester decides to rob a McDonald’s through a hole in the roof because he’s tired of living like a pauper with bills up to his chin and an ex-wife who hates him for his “loser ways”. This is the start of a robbery spree from Jeff that ends with him raking in over $1.6 million over the course of a year as he crawls through the roof into 45 different McDonald’s restaurants and empties their safes the day before the money is due to be banked. But then the police arrive and Jeff is charged not only with armed robbery but also with kidnapping, as he repeatedly detained McDonald’s staff by locking them in the freezer during his safe raids. 45 years, the sentence stops at which of course means that Jeff must find a way to escape from jail.
All this happens in the space of a few minutes at the beginning of the streaming film Roofman and is a 100% true story based on the tragic life and times of Jeffrey Manchester. Behind the camera is Derek Cianfrance, who previously made Blue Valentine (heavy, dark, brilliant) and the Ryan Gosling classic A Place Beyond The Pines, and in the lead role we find a severely slimmed-down, skinny Channing Tatum, who here has shaken off all his typical “isms” and thus never even reminds us of Magic Mike and his dancing belly squares.
Tatum is better than he has been in a long time in the role of the roof raider Jeff.
Roofman is one in a long line of films that baffles me to no end at the concept stage. This is because there is basically nothing to tell here, especially nothing of interest. Of course, that never means that the film itself, its acting and characters are actively bad – at least not by definition but given all the incredible real life stories out there that still haven’t been turned into feature films, it’s completely absurd to me that a story like Roofman gets made. The moral here, of course, is that Jeff robbed 45 McDonald’s, detained 100+ people and stole other people’s money, but did it all out of necessity because he’s basically a very kind man. Director Derek Cianfrance does everything he can and then some to build sympathy for Jeff as “misunderstood” and Tatum tries his best to portray a good man, with good intentions and good values. Jeff is kind. Jeff is sweet. Jeff is good. Good. Good. Godly. Jeff is a good father. Good. Kind. Good father. Good father. Good man! He only robs people and businesses because he has to. This message is hammered in so hard here that it almost becomes parodic and given how unexciting and uninteresting the whole premise and incidents are, I’m genuinely curious as to who bribed whom regarding funding for the go-ahead from big-name studios to even consider the idea of filming his life.
This is an ad:
Despite more than 100 years of film history, there still hasn’t been a proper biopic about Francis Albert Sinatra, but we now have a film about a failed small-town robber with a jazz moustache – at least.
That said, the acting is very good, here. Channig Tatum has proven in the past that he can do much, much more than curl up on a living room table, covered in baby oil – and here he manages to play vulnerable and panicked in a way that works, through and through. The same is true, of course, of the always good Kirsten Dunst, who has so much presence and an inherent vulnerability that makes her character Michelle the most believable in the film. The human drama in the relationship between Jeff and Michelle is good but there is too little of it and there is no real depth there either, until the last second of the whole film. On the whole, Roofman is not a bad film, but it is uninteresting and relatively monotonous.
My name Jeff…
