One very specific rule going in: don’t look in the bag.
This is what Robert De Niro (“American Hustle”) explains to John Cusack (“1408”) at the beginning of David Grovic’s debut feature “The Bag Man.” Using a steak as a prop for his scoundrel tendencies, Dragna (De Niro) explains that he needs a package delivered to a motel located in the middle of nowhere. Jack (Cusack) must wait for Dragna to pick up the bag and then he can be on his merry way.
Grovic’s “The Bag Man” suffers predominantly from a misplaced sense of humor and a generally problematic form of sexual violence on screen that is tantalizing. Jack eventually meets Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), who bears the brunt of the thrashing from crooked police officers, gangsters and pimps, although Da Costa still manages to be the most dynamic of the cast.
De Niro has quite an enjoyable time performing with a larger than life pompadour and spouting quotes from Sun Tzu and Herman Hesse. But even this doesn’t manage to reclaim “The Bag Man” from fairly lukewarm depths of portentousness.
With a New York epilogue that barely answers questions and several action sequences that leave as much of an adrenaline rush as “It’s A Small World,” the film begets a misplaced sense of its own importance and cleverness. As well as filching much of its haughty nod-nod, wink-wink sort of humor from Quentin Tarantino; hoping this is enough to hold a viewer’s attention.
“The Bag Man” as a film borrows much from Tarantino and the plot device, a bag with mysterious contents, is straight out of “Pulp Fiction.” “Kiss Me Deadly,” which provided inspiration for “Pulp Fiction,” also had the same idea of a bag whose contents remain a mystery throughout the film.
But by claiming this sort of hegemony on Tarantino spiced dialogue and plot devices, the film itself becomes just another knock-off of Tarantino films. So add “The Bag Man” to the shelf alongside “Go” and “Love and a .45.” “The Bag Man” lugs around too much latent baggage of a problematic nature to bother with it more than a cursory viewing. Though by the time the film ends there’s really no reason to care at all.
