The canon of popular American movies this side of the millennium counts several crime comedies in its ranks, among them Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” trilogy, David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” and Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys.” Ten years on, that last film’s star, Russell Crowe, headlines Derrick Borte‘s “The Get Out” — a largely underwhelming reminder of the potential thematic richness of this type of cinema, and of how difficult it is to successfully pull off. 

Crowe plays Manco Kapak, a nightclub owner from Albania who tells us, in an opening voiceover, that he has been happily settled in the United States for many years. Crowe seems a natural fit for a comic play on the cliché of the heavily accented, unnerving Eastern European criminal: His ability to hint at violent undercurrents of rage, bubbling right underneath the surface of his unforced charisma, was already put to good use in Borte’s previous directorial effort, the 2020 road-rage thriller “Unhinged.” Here, however, the joke is that appearances can be deceiving — or to be more specific, that trying to act like a character in a movie is a reckless, unwise thing to do.

Early on in the film, Manco suffers a heart attack while having sex with his girlfriend, Sunny (Teresa Palmer), but contrary to what the genre and character type might suggest, he is perfectly willing to slow down, change his eating habits, and sell his club to retire with his loving partner on a tropical island somewhere. Though he has been laundering a bit of cash for a cartel for years, he is no Tony Montana, greedily climbing to the top of the food chain and ruthlessly offing his competitors; some may see his relaxed approach to keeping a little money off the books as distinctly European, simply because it runs counter to the alarmist, moralizing rhetoric of so many American crime films.

The role thus draws more on Crowe’s good-natured appeal, with his level-headed businessman the quiet eye of a chaotic storm. When, on his way to make a cash deposit at the bank, Manco is robbed one night by a masked gunman, he simply takes from his own cash savings — his emergency fund, if you will — to make sure the cartel gets the money they’re owed. He doesn’t panic, but everybody else does, and that is where his real problems begin: The cartel grows worried about receiving negative attention, terrified employees start acting out of character, and when Manco is robbed a second time by the same masked individual, things escalate even further.

A crime story where the action is sparked and further spurred on by despair, incompetence, misunderstandings and sheer bad luck poses a challenge for a filmmaker. Torn between the seriousness of violence, and the comedy of failure and ineptitude, most directors find a way out of this conundrum by resorting to extremely dark humor. This is not an option for Borte, whose film is marked in its best moments by a refreshingly good-hearted tone and a positive view of human nature. Manco only reluctantly starts carrying a gun after his first robbery, concerned that doing so would only lead to more violence. When he notices that his employee has been snorting cocaine on the job, he reprimands him but does not threaten bodily harm. And when a young relative of the cartel boss forces him to get into a car with her, he successfully brings down the temperature of the situation. 

However, this unexpected friction between the expectations of a violent crime tale and the protagonist’s fundamental humanity requires tremendous skill for it to build a coherent tone and mood. Shot with none of the visual flair that made “Unhinged” effective, if not particularly striking, “The Get Out” awkwardly veers between unfunny, crass humor, and a more unusual but flat sincerity. Most of the comedy lies in drawing out the characters’ ridiculous attempts to fit into crime movie archetypes — but more than once, this only draws attention to the film’s own failure to meet the standards of its genre.

When Aaron Paul’s Jeff attempts to make a suspicious deposit, the bank teller (a game Nina Dobrev) demands to be in on the deal, in the sort of neo-noir twist that could suggest a rich film world populated with bizarre freaks of all stripes. Instead, and through no fault of any of the actors, this development feels more like an implausible stretch and a cheap way to introduce more chaos into the picture. Likewise, the goofiness of Luke Evans’ flamboyantly dressed nightclub buyer jars with the film’s palette.

Following a limited theatrical run, “The Get Out” should easily find an audience on VOD thanks to Crowe’s presence and to the general popularity and relative dearth of crime comedies. But despite its narratively and thematically intriguing set-up, the film is too sluggishly paced and anonymously shot to fully become the outrageous farce with a heart of gold it occasionally promises to be.