American Animals (2018)

The story: Doper artist teen goes on a school excursion to a special room on a library and sees books worth millions of dollars, being protected by a single librarian. He tells this to his charismatic friend who steals stuff from places. They start creating a plan on how to steal the books. They eventually get a third and then a fourth to join the project. The idea is to go during the day, disguised as old people, use a taser to knockout the librarian, steal the books, use an elevator to get out, use a car to get away, get documents in NY that say the books are legitimate, and sell them to fencers in Europe. What really happens in the movie: the day they are using old people's costumes there are 4 librarians on the special room, so they give up. But then they come the next day without the disguises. The stealer teen tases the librarian, but that doesn't knock her out. He threatens her. They get the books, but when they go into the elevator the third teen presses lots of buttons on it, and they stop on a lot of floors, end up running down stairs and leave some books behind. They try to get the papers for the books in NY. At this point I was like: Duh! She works with rare books. Do you think she hasn't heard about this national big robbery that happened by teens? Don't you think she's gonna tell the cops? At the end, the teens are just being stupid, until the cops get them. What probably happened in real life: A lot of the things on this movie are probably lies to create more drama. E.g.: old people disguises, pressing many buttons, etc.The style: Like one of those "based on real facts" movies, but on certain moments they put the real people, whose lives the movie was based on, being interviewed. It was an interesting approach to movie making, but there's a point where the real person say something, then the character says the same thing, then the real person say another thing, then the character repeats it, which was annoying. Also, it was absurd to me how all the actors were actually uglier and less charismatic than the real people they were portraying. Also, it's obvious to me that one of the real people was the charismatic leader that all the others gravitated towards, but that doesn't get explored on the movie.

This is novice director/writer Bart Layton's first full length film - previous credits are mainly documentaries, and this was the downfall for this film. The almost 2 hour length felt like 3 hours and really dragged out with the overly slow pace and unnecessary slo-mo scenes. Adding the real characters made this film feel like part documentary part film, which was annoying. It took away from the stories suspense and thrill as well as the great acting from the lead cast. Not sure why Bart chose this route, but had he not done so, this film would have been much better. The actual characters should have been introduced towards the end, or as an extra featurette in the DVD release, and he should have just focused on the films story instead of breaking the suspense each time the real life characters popped up.

Four young men mistake their lives for a movie and attempt one of the most audacious heists in U.S. history. American Animals was nowhere near as good as i was expecting it to be plus to be honest? i was expecting the whole 'heist' thing to have some heart and energy to it but unfortunately it didn't have any of that. The overall acting was also not as great as i was expecting especially from Evan Peters plus Blake Jenner's role was quite smaller than i imagined. It's not a bad film to say but it's definitely not as great as the trailer suggested or as i expected. (5/10)

Pretty good comedy/drama with some interesting moments. It is told from a college kids point of view and is fun to watch right up to the anti-climax. It's the story of a heist-gone-bad, as 4 students plan to rob valuable material from the college library. They have neither the experience nor the expertise for such a job, and therein lies the humor. Not sure how they could have made it better, since the story is not really as compelling as it could be - "Topkapi" it is not.6/10 - The website no longer prints my star ratings.