Out On His Own

This website generally covers genre films. Sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and action are generally what we focus on here, not by any specific need to actually narrow down this site but more because that’s mostly what I watch at home. While I tend to tell people I’ll watch anything, if I’m left to my own devices I tend to settle in with a good horror film or a sci-fi space epic. We all have our comfort genres and those are definitely mine. I can do comedies or dramas, sure, and sometimes those are really good, but I’ll take a journey through space over a dramatic story about families, 95 times out of 100.

Honestly I hadn’t expected to review Roofman at all, mostly because I hadn’t expected to watch Roofman at all. It came and went in the theaters barely making a blip and failing (by Hollywood math) to recoup its budget of $19 Mil when it only made $34.7 Mil during its release window. Back in the days of DVD sales and home video rental stores, that kind of haul would have been a solid first run for a low-budget drama. In today’s market, that’s a real flop. No one seemed to care about this film. I certainly didn’t.

That is, in large part, because even from the trailers you could easily predict the plot of this film. A career criminal gets caught, escapes prison to try and make a life for himself, and ends up hiding out for over six months in a Toys-R-Us. He meets a girl, gets to know their family, and then has to decide whether to stay with them or run off to a country without extradition laws so he could pretend to be someone else and stay out of prison forever. From that description, how exactly do you think the film is going to play out? I’m sure you can guess.

There were a couple of things that were supposed to make this film more interesting for the average viewer. The first was that it was based on a true story. That is true, by the Hollywood definition of “based on a true story” because Hollywood can’t take a story without changing things up. A version of this story did happen, with the fugitive, Jeffrey Manchester (played by Channing Tatum in the film) managing to survive for months in a Toys-R-Us (and later a Circuit City) without anyone finding him. Certain events play out similarly (his hiding, his one last big score, his eventual capture because his girlfriend turns him in), but it all takes on the air of a morality play in the end, with the character even saying, “I’m right where I belong,” as he sits in prison.

The story, though, raised some issues for me that I really couldn’t get past. The first felt like the most obvious: the whole reason we know this “unbelievable true story” is because Jeffrey got caught. It seems impossible that a guy could hide out for this long and not get caught, we think… except he did get caught, and then he told his story and eventually got a movie based on his escapades. We know how the story played out because he got caught. The more interesting story, one would think, would be about one of the fugitives that didn’t get caught. Jeffrey’s tale is a morality play that has a Hollywood ending. The guys that don’t get caught, that just disappear, never get their movies because they aren’t dumb enough to go back to prison.

That doesn’t stop Hollywood from embellishing, though. It’s pretty clear that while the original tale of Manchester’s time in Toys-R-Us was used, so much of the rest of the story is fictionalized and invented. Dialogue with all the characters; family drama between Jeffrey (going as John while a fugitive), his girlfriend (played by Kirsten Dunst), and her kids; criminals that Jeffrey knew that would never actually tell their stories for the movie (because, unlike Jeffrey, they weren’t caught)... all of this is faked and made up. It creates a Hollywood drama, but it never really rings as entirely true.

There’s also the fact that, despite everything the film tries to do, Jeffrey isn’t a very likable character. Don’t get me wrong, Channing Tatum does all he can with the role. He’s a very charismatic actor and he clearly invests as much as he can in playing Jeffrey. He doesn’t disappear into the role, still playing a “Channing Tatum” type despite taking on the character of an actual person, but for what he’s given, and what he can do, he sells it for all he can. The issue isn’t with the actor; it’s with Jeffrey.

We’re told, and shown, early on that Jeffrey is very smart. Probably a genius. He can see things, study things, and work out detailed, complex plans in minutes. One would think that in normal circumstances he could get a job doing anything. He’s military trained with a high school diploma, and he would have had access to plenty of post-military career services, like the GI Bill. With his background, and his skills, he could do just about anything. The movie never shows us why, then, Jeffrey ends up broke, divorced, and unable to get a job, leading him to a life of crime. This is key background we need so that when he looks around and realizes he could be a criminal there’s a reason why he does this instead of, say, working for a security firm or taking a military desk job.

Because of that, we can’t invest in Jeffrey as a protagonist. We see him get caught after his last robbery (although, likewise, the film doesn’t show us how the cops figured out he was the so called “Roofman”, because the crimes involved cutting a hole open through restaurant roofs) and sent to prison, but there’s no remorse, no sense that he regrets anything he did. Everyone calls him “nice” and “polite”, but he’s still a career criminal robbing stores and holding people up at gunpoint. Without reasoning for why he goes this route he comes across not as a “good guy done wrong” but a “bad guy with some charisma”. It makes him hard to watch.

Then there’s the fact that he’s also an idiot. As the film puts it, “he’s very smart… but also very stupid.” For all his skills in setting up crimes, Jeffrey doesn’t have the skill to plot out solid escape routes or think about what comes next. He settles into places, thinks he’s safe, and functionally does everything he can for people to eventually figure out who he is so he can get caught. For instance, he shits where he eats. By that I mean that when he was doing his original spree of crimes he robbed McDonalds because he used to work at a McDonalds. The movie doesn’t establish this, but looking up his story you find that out pretty easily. Similarly, when he has to make his one last, big score he robs the very Toys-R-Us he’s been hiding out inside. That means that when the cops come investigating afterwards he’s burned the one place he could hide in if he needs an escape. That’s sloppy and stupid.

And let’s not forget that this guy then starts up a relationship with a woman, and her kids, becoming a father figure to her teens while becoming someone she can rely on as well. All of that is, of course, a lie. He had to lie about who he was and why he was in town, and then he had to keep lying. When he’s finally caught, then, he likely did more damage to that family than he would have if he’d just stayed away entirely. He’s not a good guy and that’s a really shitty thing to do.

All of this is to say that I really hated watching Jeffrey’s story. Yes, the idea that a guy could escape prison and hide out for months (when most people get caught again within days) is pretty interesting. But it’s only interesting to a point, and the film doesn’t have much to go on past that point. His escape from prison is an interesting tidbit in a larger story that plates more like a family drama despite Jeffrey being a real shit heel. The movie wants us to view him as a protagonist, delighting in how he finally finds a family and true love despite, eventually, having to go back to prison. But all its efforts to get us to love Jeffrey fall flat, over and over again.

In the end Jeffrey’s story isn’t incredible, it’s just long. He managed to hide out for a time in Toys-R-Us, sure, but he still got caught. He’s not a genius robber with a heart of gold; he’s just an asshole that lingered for a while before finally going back to prison. Roofman tries to be a warm and uplifting tale about a guy learning some kind of morality lesson. The only lesson is, though, that this film really needed a better dude at the center of its story, based on a true tale or not.