Good Peo­ple

That title is a mis­nomer – it should actu­al­ly read ​“stu­pid peo­ple”, because this film is about stu­pid peo­ple who chose to do a whole bunch of stu­pid things. And then they ask us to feel sor­ry for their stu­pid­i­ty. The film­mak­ers have pegged them as ​“good” because they’re a young, white, mid­dle-class cou­ple – Anna and Tom (played by Kate Hud­son and James Fran­co) – ele­gant­ly slum­ming in their Hack­ney flat, sim­ply crav­ing a bet­ter life for themselves.

Oppor­tu­ni­ty comes a‑knocking when a crew of goons hold up a strip club and one of their num­ber nicks off with the loot, wend­ing his way direct­ly back to the flat under­neath the hap­py cou­ple. A knock on the door, a whiff of dead body, a swarm of blue­bot­tles lat­er, and our good folks are left with a quandary: do they snaff up the big pile of cash that this ex-per­son has been stash­ing, or do they do the right thing and tell the police and con­tin­ue in their state of abject mis­ery but with the faint glow of civic pride?

Because this is movieland, you know how this one goes down, and it seems that no moral argu­ment that Anna throws at Tom can dent his enthu­si­asm for theft. Tom Wilkinson’s old guard detec­tive is on to them right away, watch­ing like a hawk until they start deposit­ing the mon­ey to pay of all their debts. But the goons, led by the always-men­ac­ing Sam Spru­ell, want their dough, and so a course of intim­i­da­tion and heavy beat­ings ensue.

Cast­ing aside the fact that this movie is stratos­pher­i­cal­ly dumb, bare­ly a frame of it ring­ing with any kind of hon­esty, it has been put togeth­er by direc­tor Hen­rik Ruben Genz in a way which allows it to func­tion as a ser­vice­able, dead-eyed thriller. Good Peo­ple starts like Shal­low Grave and ends like Pacif­ic Heights, but even if you love those two movies with all your heart, you’d still do best to think long and hard before div­ing into this one.