Best Laid Plans

Lots of critics seem to quite like Best Laid Plans for reasons I am at a complete loss to fathom. Nowhere near as dark or brooding as its storyline would seem to demand, nor as funny as it could have been with a modicum of effort, Best Laid Plans drowns in its own delusions of coolness. Only Reese Witherspoon's characteristically edgy performance offers anything to savour.

The plot: Nick (Nivola) and Lissa (Witherspoon) are a pair of star-crossed small-town lovers (yawn) who find themselves heavily in debt to a local scumbag, and hatch an ingenious plan to make up the cash shortfall. This involves Nick persuading Lissa to seduce Nick's best mate, liberate his collection of valuable coins, and then accuse him of rape.

You may have gathered by this stage that the couple are a pair of heartless, soulless bastards, and it's precisely this lack of heart and soul which makes it wholly impossible to give a flying fuck what happens to our heroes. The direction is competent but hardly arresting, the performances are serviceable but gainlessly employed, and the action neither moves fast enough nor hits hard enough to justify the film's existence.

This kind of thing has been done so often that it just doesn't wash anymore without a truly distinctive or novel approach, and for all its labyrinthine twists and turns, the film leaves you with an overwhelming feeling of 'so what?'

Best Laid Plans deserves your complete indifference, and then some.