Certificate 15, 99mins

The Lookout is a thoughtful crime movie and the directorial debut of Scott Frank, the Oscar-nominated writer of Out of Sight (1998). It takes the noir convention of a guileless patsy and pushes it to the extreme, in this case with Joseph Gordon-Levitt starring as Chris Pratt, a brain-damaged bank cleaner who becomes involved in a heist at his own branch.

Chris, it transpires, was a college ice-hockey star and local demigod until a drunken stunt in a speeding car pulverised his skull and transformed him into a slow-witted ghost of his former self. Thus the rest of the film, with its shades of Fargo and Memento, follows his emerging friendship with mobster Gary (a charismatic Matthew Goode), and his romantic entanglement with the improbably monikered moll Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), and ultimately describes his emotional and moral rehabilitation in the face of extreme danger. It is just a shame that the last act, bowing to genre demands for a bloody, bullet-ridden finale, is so conventional.

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