The Lookout: Film review

By Michael Shamash

Chris (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is a promising high school hockey player whose life changes after a horrific car crash that kills two of his friends, seriously injures his girlfriend and leaves him with head injuries. He then lives with a blind man, Lewis (Jeff Daniels) who he meets at a rehab unit, and has a job cleaning a bank.

This film does something very rare in the movies in examining how life’s circumstances change with an acquired injury, yet it is aimed at the teenage multiplex market, with a disability meets Dawson’s Creek pitch. We see how Chris’s affluent family can’t face up to his disability and how he is marginalized. His only friends are Lewis and the local policeman, who buys him doughnuts.

In an attempt to face up to his impairment, Chris goes to a bar, where he meets Gary (Matthew Goode), an embittered ex-school mate. They become friendly and he is invited to a remote, ramshackle farmhouse where Gary and his gang inform him they are planning a heist at the bank that employs him and want him to be the lookout. After being snubbed for promotion at the bank he agrees to join them.

The Lookout is an oddity. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be teen social drama or teen horror, and becomes an uneasy mixture of both. We see Chris’s emotional turmoil, and his difficulties in organising his life, including how he always has to write everything down. Simultaneously we have a teen slasher horror movie with a ghoulish character, Bone (Greg Dunham), who looks like Bono of U2’s grandfather, orchestrating the bloodshed.

This is a film that wants to be two different films at once. Is it a gory horror by numbers film for the mall generation or is it something more, an examination of the effects of disability on the youth of middle America? It is Nightmare on Elm Street examines disability and downward mobility yet fails to find disabled actors to fill two plum roles.  . Most peculiar!  And a bit of a shame.