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Tim Allen as Critical Jim, the hit man who loves movies
DOUBLE INDIGNITY
Critical Jim - as played by Tim Allen, the much-loved voice of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear, here enthusiastically displaying his “mean streak” - is sharing his love of the movies with Christian Slater’s character, Trevor Finch. Except - for reasons we’ll get to in a minute - Critical Jim thinks Finch is called Cletis Tout (‘Cletis’ like you’d expect, ‘Tout’ as in ‘ticket tout’, which rhymes with ‘bout’ and is the British word for a scalper). Finch/Cletis, meanwhile, is in no position to argue because he’s tied to a chair in Jim’s hotel room. He’s what you might call a ‘captive audience’.
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At the beginning,
he’s just an escaped con in need of a new identity. But, before long, he’s on the run with the whole East Coast mob on his tail accompanied by a beautiful woman who will hardly talk to him. Dick Niro explores the uniquely noirish world of Cletis Tout.
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Critical Jim, the hit man who never misses, wants Cletis to know that he particularly loves The Great Escape. “You know why”? he asks, rhetorically. “Third act. It has a third act. You don’t see that in movies any more. Now? Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick. Great set-up. Great first act: what can we blow up? How big do we make the monster? Problem is, you concentrate on the gimmick, you short-change the ending. The audience leaves unfulfilled.”
Not much chance of that here, reckons Allen, who describes the screenplay of Cletis Tout as “funny, smart and many-layered”. No question: Cletis Tout has a third act. It also has shoot-outs, car chases (well, a bicycle chasing a car), cliff-hangers, comedy, loveable characters, its fair share of violent death, a little bit of sex. And romance. As Slater points out, “It has all this crazy stuff that’s going on around it. But at the core, I think it’s really a nice love story between myself and Portia de Rossi.”
‘Story’ is the key word. While other movies have concepts, Cletis Tout has a plot of the kind we’ve hardly seen since the golden days of Casablanca, Double Indemnity - or, for that matter, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, another of Critical Jim’s favourites.
Here, without giving too much away, is how Critical Jim and Finch/Cletis came to meet up. In one sense, it was simple: Jim had been given a contract to eliminate Cletis after a series of lesser operatives had failed to do the job, despite impressive quantities of gasoline and some 500 rounds of machine-gun ammo. As is his wont, before finishing the job, Jim calls the client - one Paulie The Fist - to arrange for payment to be transferred to his bank account. Waiting for confirmation to come through, he chats with Cletis. But Cletis has a story to tell. “A good story. It’s got it all... a jewel heist, a prison-break, a girl...”
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