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This film clearly wants you to see its protagonist, real life armed robber Jeffery Manchester, as a good man who made some bad choices. The tag line at the bottom of the poster all but states this. How much you go with this will definitely impact how much you are able to enjoy the movie as a whole. 

Personally I found myself totally unable to condone his actions so it all just annoyed me. I will admit that I got swept up in the story and characterisation to the point that I wanted him to get away with everything at the end, but that just annoyed me more. Manchester, as played by a very charming Channing Tatum, is presented as a smart guy and I suppose it kind of impressive how he managed to hold up almost four dozen fast food restaurants, escape from jail and then hide out in a Toys R Us for half a year (this isn’t a spoiler, it says all of this on the poster too) but he is also infuriatingly stupid. Similarly he does appear to show genuine consideration for his victims (and by all accounts the events on screen are an accurate representation of how things really went down) but he is also pathologically and dangerously selfish with no apparent thought for how his actions will actually affect others. He’s not Robin Hood or the roguish antihero of an Elmore Leonard novel; he’s an a-hole. 

There are clearly a number of films featuring likeable crims, not just from Leonard, and many of these do far worse than this guy. (I still find it fascinating that cinema is so very widely forgiving of professional assassin as a chosen career path.) It’s not just that this is a true story either; I sympathised easily with the characters in The Bank Job, King of Thieves, Dog Day Afternoon, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and Heat. I think maybe it’s that I felt this was actively manipulating me in a way those other movies didn’t. 

In this respect I do lay some of the blame on director Derek Cianfrance. The narrative is well presented and the film nicely crafted but for me it didn’t quite work. Cianfrance got this balance so right with Ryan Gosling’s Luke in The Place Beyond the Pines but here he lost me. The performances are also strong from the big names in small supporting roles to leads Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, as the woman who entirely unwittingly proves his downfall. The suggestion that this is a career best for Channing Tatum is way off though.

As suggested at the start, this is a response that may well be particular to me. I understand that lots of people have rated this, hailing it as a parable to second chances and a touching story of one man’s quest for an ordinary life. I can see this but I still couldn’t get past how much of an unforgivable jerk he is. 

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