BOTTLE ROCKET

 I have something of a love/hate relationship with Wes Anderson’s films so I approached this, his debut feature, with the hope that it might be a bit looser than his later hermetically sealed work.

So it’s about a couple of guys who, like a lot of Anderson’s protagonists, combine innocence, melancholy and delusion. 

Dignan (great name) is played by Owen Wilson and is someone under the delusion that he is competent although underlying his bravado lurks an insecurity.

His friend Anthony (played by Luke Wilson) starts the film leaving a mental hospital. We’re never told why he was there other than exhaustion’ which I think points to depression. 

Dignan is seeking a life of crime with the help of Anthony and a rich but downtrodden friend of theirs, Bob.

Cue an amusing raid of a bookstore followed by hiding out in a motel. Rather surprisingly the film then kind of stalls as Anthony starts a romance with a Paraguayan housemaid Inez, 

Eventually all three friends return home, and we meet Mr Henry (played by James Caan) who seems to both run a landscaping business and be a small league crime boss who Dignan reveres.

The film ends with an attempted heist which of course is a catalogue of ineptitude, leading to Dignan being arrested whilst Mr Henry takes advantage of the heist to rob Bob’s parents house.

But it all ends happily in that Anthony and Inez are reunited, and Dignan feels some validation in the way he got arrested - trying to rescue on of the gang who had got shot.

Whilst the story is quite thin and the comedic moments are slight there’s an innocent charm to the whole thing which won me over by the end.