What’s this all about?
A pair of bumbling Las Vegas cops who work as property clerks (or maybe as Crime Scene Investigators?) stumble upon a secret storage facility for drug money, because they’re paying attention to the paperwork that everyone else is ignoring.
They hatch a plan to execute a heist, and as is always the case, things fall apart, largely due to the incompetent nature of the two cops.
It’s sort of a comedy, but also a heist movie, and it’s fronted by two bankable Hollywood stars.
This sounds like a movie that I’d love.
It almost is.
But it’s not. Read on.
Who is Nick in this one?
Nick plays “Stone,” the senior bumbling cop. He isn’t respected by his peers, and has a weird sense of humor. He does things like eating lemon slices topped with Tabasco sauce, which he admits disliking. For some reason, he’s in a leadership role, although the scope of his authority is unclear.
Who else is in this one?
Elijah Wood (Frodo) plays “Waters.” He’s a nervous little stoner, who doesn’t take his job very seriously. It’s unclear how/why he became a cop. It’s also unclear why he’s friends with Nick, who is apparently also his boss.
Jerry Lewis (Many telethons) plays Nick’s dad in two scenes that last mere seconds. I don’t know why he’s in the movie.
Ethan Suplee (the bully kid from Boy Meets World) plays an asshole cop, credited as “Detective”.
Did you see that?
We are introduced to Elijah Wood’s character in a closeup of his face, where he’s staring blindly into space in concentrated disinterest. As the camera pans back, it’s revealed that he’s having disinterested sex with a prostitute.
I guess that’s supposed to be funny, or ironic, or something.
I’ve seen this trope used over and over again in films, where a character looks like they’re bored out of their mind, then we see that they are having sex performed on them. It’s overused. It isn’t clever. I hope the hundreds of filmmakers undoubtedly reading this take my message to heart, and quit using this stupid device. -Michael
Towards the end of the movie, as the girl is escaping, she climbs over a front bench seat in a minivan. Was that ever a real thing? Was there ever a minivan that you could order bench seats in? Aside from that once she gets into the driver’s seat, she stops the car, but the car comes to a stop wwwwaaaaayyyyy too quickly. At least according to the background scenery visible through the windows of the vehicle. And she had zero bounce back to the stop. It was all so surear and unrealistic it was distracting. -Sarah
What were Nick’s best parts?
Nick uses his property clerk powers to find an illegal gun dealer, and to arrange a buy. Upon meeting the dealer, and getting in his car, Nick begins the awkward, dad-joke banter that is typical of his character throughout the movie.
When they arrive at the final destination, Nick examines the guns while the dealer counts the money and complains about how “corny” Nick is. Nick swiftly and coldly slides a cartridge into the cylinder of a revolver that he’s examining, and shoots the dealer in the head, before discarding the revolver in the dealer’s car, and collecting the remaining guns and his money.
It gives us a quick glimpse that Nick may not be the goofball loser that he pretends to be.
It’s very well executed, and we get a couple of other nods in this direction, but sadly, it never pays off. -Michael
Nick calls a manufacturer in Germany to order a drill that they will use to break into the vault. It was well done. He attempts to speak German for a bit using a translation dictionary. He portrays the awkwardness of his character perfectly. There were some scenes in this movie where the acting was fantastic, but it just didn’t come together. -Sarah
What were Nick’s worst parts?
During the heist, Elijah Wood manages to open a vault door, but upon seeing what’s inside, closes and locks the vault. Nick attempts to convince him to reopen the door. He does this, in part, by repeating the phrase “open it” with no pause or inflection, resulting in a closeup of Nick saying “openitopenitopenitopenit.”
It’s stupid and out of place. -Michael
Elijah and Nick are going over the heist plan in this empty parking lot where Elijah has taken the time to make a scale floor plan on the parking lot using some sort of white tape. During the bulk of this scene Nick is applying white cream to his nose. It’s that sunblock from olden times. I remember it being in movies and cartoons when I was a kid, but I can’t actually remember people using the stuff. The whole bit made no sense, was a complete distraction, and felt really out of place. -Sarah
How was the movie?
As mentioned earlier, this movie sounds like it should be right up my alley. Unfortunately, the execution was lacking in almost every area.
The story itself seemed to hint at a larger, twistier plot, but never delivers. Is Nick more than just a sad sack property clerk? We never find out. Why did Frodo freak out upon finding that the vault was full of valuables? No idea. Who was the woman that they held hostage, and who did she call to help her? Could be anybody. What was the deal with the guns in the hidden closet? Nothing, I guess. Was the heist some sort of attempt at a frame up as Frodo suggests? Who knows?
I honestly feel like the plot would have been much better if all of these “mysteries” had been left out, and it had just been a heist movie.
Similarly, the casting and acting fell short. Nick didn’t seem to be able to commit to a character between a sad sack mope, and a cringey goofball. He made a bunch of cornball jokes that were actually kind of funny, but the movie treated them like a fart in church. Similarly, Frodo played his role like he was either super stoned, or remote controlling himself from a distance. There was no character beyond a guy just staring in bewilderment at everything, or shouting in resigned frustration. It was like the director said, “pretend you’re Napoleon Dynamite, but not endearing.” We know that both of these men can act. For some reason, they just didn’t.
The filmmaking felt like a bunch of stoners came up with “great ideas for movie scenes,” and made a movie entirely out of those. The entire picture was trying hard to be the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video, while working in “what if a drug dealer used a bakery as a front, so all of their money/drugs went out disguised as cupcakes?” and “what if a guy put one bullet in a revolver and forced you to play Russian Roulette so you know he’s crazy, but really, he just palmed the bullet when you weren’t looking?” scenes that added nothing to the story.
I actually went to Wikipedia and read the plot synopsis before writing this, because I felt like there must have been some subtle thing that I missed that could explain the holes in the plot, or the behavior of the characters, or why it is titled “The Trust,” for that matter. Alas, there was nothing.
This movie went from debut to DirectTV in exactly a month. On a $9 million dollar budget, it made $321k at the box office, but it appears to have gotten a very limited release, instead, focusing on video-on-demand viewers, so who knows if it was profitable?
If this had been just slightly different, it could have been great. Think, two bumbling police property clerks stumble upon the location of a drug kingpin’s money stash. They decide to steal the money, but knowing nothing about actual crimes, they base their entire plan on heist movie tropes. Hilarity ensues as everything goes wrong, and our lovable idiots make it out by the skin of their teeth, maybe pinning the failed heist on some corrupt cops that they know, or something, made in the style of Hot Fuzz.
Instead, it was just kind of nothing. -Michael
It was not a good movie. -Sarah
Yeah, but did you like it?
I didn’t hate it, but if I just happened upon it airing on TV, I can’t think of a single scene that I’d wait around to watch. -Michael
I feel the same. It was an okay watch. Far from the worst Nick has done, but I’m not going to watch it again. -Sarah
Where can I watch it?
Say it with me, kids. It’s free on Tubi (not sponsored, I swear).
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