Movie Review: Robert Pattinson Is Desperate and Mateless in the Super-Stressful "Good Time"

Robert Pattinson plays a desperate bank-robber trying to break his brother out of lock-up in the pulse-quickening Good Time.

Armed robbery. Assault. Fraud. Kidnapping. Breaking and entering. Impersonating an officer.

Robert Pattinson’s charges in Good Time, the relentless thriller from directors Ben and Josh Safdie, finally outweigh his previous cinematic crimes (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Parts 1 & 2).

Though he’s spent the past five years shedding the sparkly skin of Edward Cullen with roles in arthouse flicks for David Cronenberg and Werner Herzog, The Artist Formerly Known as R-Patz gives his best, sweatiest and most unexpected performance to date in Good Time.

He plays Connie, an ex-con and current-wanted man who spends a nightmarish evening trying to get his disabled brother, Nick (Ben Safdie) out of jail, after their attempted bank robbery goes disastrously wrong.

Connie pressures his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to pay the $10,000 bond, and fails; attempts to smuggle Nick out of hospital—where he’s recovering from a prison beating—under the nose of police surveillance; seduces a teenager (Taliah Webster) into becoming his getaway driver; and, in a particularly lurid sequence, torments a security guard (Barkhad Abdi) at an amusement park where he’s seeking a spiked Sprite bottle previously dumped by a drug dealer, so he can sell it for bond money.

It’s a bad trip, man. For Connie, that is. Not us. I was way into it.

Written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, Connie’s rough night makes for an engrossing 99 minutes; more captivating and intense than almost any other action film in 2017 (save for Baby Driver, its brother in bank-robbing arms).

The Safdies and cinematographer Sean Price Williams saturate Connie’s nocturnal escapades with fluorescent purple globes, blue lights and beet-red bruises. As his actions grow more despicable, the immersive, audience-indicting close-ups are replaced with Connie-isolating crane shots. (An early foot chase puts us in the middle of the action, but a later one is filmed from the top-down, as if we’re watching the original GTA game.)

And somehow, this is a love story?

A closing-credit song by synth-heavy score composer Oneohtrix Point Never and Iggy Pop attempts to explain Connie’s muddy motives: "The damned always act from love." For most of its runtime, I enjoyed Good Time—even though I found it super stressful—from a distance. However, a late sequence involving Nicky, who never loses the privilege of a sympathetic close-up, fills the movie’s emotional empty spaces.

Given the Safdies’ preference for street-casting (meaning: getting untrained actors off the street), Pattinson does well to inhabit his animalistic character. (Connie’s almost-supernatural connection with dogs makes his performance feel especially Rottweiler-esque.) On the other hand, Ben’s decision to play Nick, rather than a disabled actor, raised an eyebrow; yet he too blends into the picture’s warped reality.

Their hyper-colour world is otherwise populated by strange faces and bewildered, presumably unwitting extras. This thing's so raw, I’m still not convinced the directors had shooting permits. Good Time isn’t just nerve-wracking because Connie’s scattershot schemes keep blowing up in his face; it keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering how the Safdies even got this footage.

4/5

In cinemas nationally (excluding Western Australia and South Australia) October 12. It opens in S.A. on October 19 and W.A. on December 4 (for the Perth Festival). Rated MA15+ for strong violence, coarse language, drug use and sex scene.