LaRoy, Texas **** (2023, John Magaro, Steve Zahn, Megan Stevenson, Matthew Del Negro, Dylan Baker) – Classic Movie Review 12,965

Shane Atkinson’s beady-eyed, satisfyingly unsettling, relentlessly peculiar 2023 neo-noir black comedy crime thriller LaRoy, Texas is lots of super-cynical, bad-tempered, disreputable fun.

Writer/ director Shane Atkinson’s beady-eyed, satisfyingly unsettling, relentlessly peculiar 2023 neo-noir black comedy crime thriller LaRoy, Texas certainly has its idiosyncratic appeal and its highlight moments, some of them intriguing, some of them funny, some of them weird, and some of them just nasty.

It stars John Magaro, Steve Zahn, Megan Stevenson, Matthew Del Negro and Dylan Baker. It is kind of cool, and it has cult movie appeal status written all over it.

According to Shane Atkinson, Texas is apparently full of deranged gun-wielding nutters, who’d do anything to cheat and lie and steal and kill. The tourist board should sue. No wonder it was filmed in New Mexico! The performances are a level even above excellent, and so are the script’s story, dialogue and characters, score (Delphine Malaussena, Rim Laurens, Clément Peiffer) and cinematography (Mingjue Hu). Everything good. Lots of super-cynical, bad-tempered, disreputable fun.

John Magaro stars as the sad schmuck Ray, who operates his family-owned hardware store with his brother Junior (Matthew Del Negro) in a small Texas town. He is accosted by Skip (Steve Zahn), a man in a cowboy hat who claims he is a private detective and offers him photographs that indicate his beloved one-time beauty queen wife Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson) is cheating on him, with Junior it turns out.

Ray decides he’s going to kill himself and buys a revolver from a gun shop but, as he sits in his car, a stranger gets in, mistaking him for a low-rent hitman, and hands Ray thousands of dollars as part payment for an assassination that must be done the next day. Well, you know how it is in Texas. And if you don’t, this film will fill you in neatly.

[Spoiler alert] The film starts with the actual contract killer Harry (Dylan Baker), who is a very mean sun of a gun, stopping his car as he picks up a stranger along the road, and the plot keeps revving up nicely from this starting point on to its surprise oddball conclusion. As expected, it is not exactly a happy ending. Naturally, most of the characters don’t survive the movie, but the less likely ones do, of course. It’s that kind of offbeat movie.

If you like this kind of thing, this is the very kind of thing you like. Congratulations to Shane Atkinson for bringing something fresh, surprising and exciting in a fairly crowded market. Performance wise the film belongs to John Magaro, Steve Zahn, Megan Stevenson and Dylan Baker. Zahn and Stevenson really relish their showy parts, while Magaro and Baker do good with less showy characters, all four of them playing it for all it’s worth and even a bit more.

The pacing is good over a fairly long running time of 112 minutes, and it gets the tone exactly right, taking the complex, twisty plot deadly seriously and undercutting it with the dark comedy laughs.

It was shot in in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, starting in late August 2022.

It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8, 2023 and was released by Brainstorm Media on April 12, 2024.

Genre: Comedy, Crime, Thriller.

The cast are John Magaro as Ray, Steve Zahn as Skip, Dylan Baker as Harry, Megan Stevenson as Stacy-Lynn, Matthew Del Negro as Junior, Brannon Cross as Brian Tiller, Vic Browder as James Barlow, Darcy Shean as Midge LeDoux, Emily Pendergast as Kayla, Brad Leland as Adam Ledoux, Galadriel Stineman as Angie, and Bob Clendenin as Ben Finney.

© Derek Winnert 2024 – Classic Movie Review 12,965

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