A trio with an usual trade: bank robbers; an inheritance from their parents, execute well planned heists in Boston. Only things go sideways when Doug, the mastermind, went to jail and rather rationally, divorced from drugs and booze, is looking to ply the trade to get out, rather than further in, like everyone else. When they rob a bank and take the manager as collateral, it’s the unexpected catalyst and galvanizing force to find something apart.

Away from the insular town, his friends all going the same way. Death, jail, drugs, heists. Their lives are the definition of insanity, but only Doug can see this. Patterns are hard to break, just like alcoholism. During the course of the crew combining efforts for the next big job, there is far better rendered character work than some literary work. Only, not for everyone. While one could be argued as intentionally opaque, the other is the cop chasing them down, and he feels fairly paper thin. Motivated by thrills and jealously. Doug, his best friend and his sister, though, are embodiments of degrees of a life set to a pattern without the help of interruption or intervention. Some are perceived easily, others slowly unravel throughout the plot masterfully.

The conceit of Doug’s fixation and projection onto the bank manager is unique and not something I’ve encountered in this kind of fiction. It doubles thematically, symbolically, and is the meat of the plot and message. I think it easily plays out like something commercial, superficial, if not for the work it puts in. This actually made me like the movie even more because it explains the intricacies slowly and methodically along with the plot, and the movie simply doesn’t have the time for it.

Speaking of, this has the handicap of my having seen and loved the movie many times. I expected this to be bog standard commercial fiction, but it’s actually more like upmarket - almost literary. But not quite. The prose work is again, much better than commercial, especially the dialogue, which doesn’t, as is almost always the case with these heist stories, devolve into one-liners. It’s got excellent flow, and embeds a musicality that creeps with the tension. Really, I think my only complaint would be that if it were literary fiction, which it isn’t, the character work for those two would be better. Loved everything else about it.