Tuner

I guess we should be careful what we wish for. For year's I've been wanting to get back to a time when we could see simple but effective little theatrically released genre movies that didn't have to wallow in the type of "elevated" themes, overwritten twisty screenplays, or, God forbid, concepts, that weigh films down and exhaust me as a viewer. Just as I had been saying to myself, I wish I could just see a new but good old-fashioned lovers-on-the-run bank robber movie, or a simple comedy about rival singer/songwriters, or a low-budget heist picture with a simple but original gimmick that sets it apart from every other low-budget heist picture, I ended up seeing all three of those is rapid succession. And they all felt a bit... lacking.

The best of these is Tuner, a low-budget heist picture with a simple but original gimmick. All I want from a simple low-budget heist picture is for the protagonist to be unique and for the bad guys not to be like every other bad guys in this type of movie. But it turns out that' not all I want, I want it to feel fresh and uncontrived. Tuner delivers much of this. It's got a hell of great protagonist. Leo Woodall (the boy in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) plays a former piano prodigy named Niki. Early in his life, Leo had to abandon his dreams of a music career when he developed an extreme sensitivity to loud noises necessitating his wearing heavy duty ear protection wherever he goes. His condition and natural musical gifts—perfect pitch and and auditory eidetic memory—make him ideally suited to the dwindling but highly specialized profession of piano tuner. Now somewhere in his mid-late twenties, He's become business partners with his late father's buddy (Dustin Hoffman) who takes care of the pristine Steinways and Faziolis at New York conservatories and the neglected instruments of wealthy Manhattan socialites. It turns out, Niki's unique skillset also makes him a first-rate safecracker. Through an uncontrived series of events, he falls in with a gang of smalltime Israeli criminals who pose as security system installers.

What a great set-up. Watching Tuner I felt I was back in the 1990s when movies like Red Rock West and Bound would just arrive in theaters with almost no fanfare, here was a little gem could become a new fav. The story develops nicely with the introduction of Niki's poetical love interest, Ruthie is played by Havana Rose Liu of Bottoms, Lurker, and Power Ballad (another of the aforementioned pictures I saw with this one that started out strong but left me feeling cinematically undernourished). Ruthie is living the life Niki was on track for before his condition derailed his life and career. Through their excellent first scene together and as the relationship develops, writers Daniel Roher and Robert Ramsey fill in Niki's backstory effortlessly.

Hoffman, predictably, is not as much of a presence in this picture as the poster and advertising would lead you to believe, but we hardly care since Liu and the folks who play the bad guys are so engaging. Until they suddenly aren't. It's wild how this well constructed script set in a unique milieu specifically details in fascinating ways, devolves into a stilted and labored mess of clichés and coincidence that require the viewer to suspend disbelief way beyond an acceptable level. This happens long before the turn into the third act, where a lot of genre films fall down, but it becomes really poor during the climax. What old-fashioned shame. I still recommend Turner. There's so much to like in this movie it would be a shame to skip it, but it's also extra frustrating imagining the picture this could have been had Roher (the director of solid documentaries like Navalny and Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band) been to been able to continue telling such a charmingly fresh and distinctive story instead of seeming to set the film on autopilot sometime past the halfway point.