'Bad Cops Make The Best Criminals'
Pretty great tagline, to be honest!
Source: filmxy.com

First of all, apologies for getting this review out to you guys so late. I saw this on the 6^th of April but between end of year college work, just general movie fatigue after watching one a day everyday last year as well as writing a review for each one and basically life happening, it’s taken me a while to get around to it. Anyway; besides all of that! Making a first of a supposed six appearances this year, ‘The Trust’ is a rather offbeat and very enjoyable little heist film.

Offbeat really is the word of the day when describing this film because as soon as the opening titles played with the jaunty little tune that was accompanying them, it’s the word that immediately came into my head and it follows through with the rest of the film too. Whilst this is happening it also shows our two lead characters in their morning routine as we see their contrasting; it’s a nice introduction and quickly shows us the personality of the two leads and what makes them different. Even if not is all as it seems at first and there is an interesting switch the longer the film goes on.

One surprising thing about the film that I did not expect at all is how funny it is! The humour is very dry and overall just seems very playful, sometimes there’s comedic scenes going on in the background, a character will just randomly say something or a character running away from a truck, while they’re trying to be stealthy and they fall over themselves, for example. It almost seems as if the film was going to go ‘boo!’ and jump out with a random comedy scene at any moment, there’s a character who points a gun at his head at one point and given how the film’s tone is, I half expected him to kill himself and the film to just go ‘meh’, move on to the next scene and none of it would have felt out of place. There’s one point where Jim (Cage) walks into the middle of a street and points at a car to stop it and that’s just pure Cage right there as well as pulling a serious face right before he does something crazy with a button and I love it.

Good ol' Nic!
Souce: http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/ 

Speaking of Cage, it is always nice to see him again in something. It’s like seeing an old friend from high school that you don’t see all too often but every time that you do, it’s like nothing has changed. His performance is fantastic and it’s great to see him unleash in a role like this once again. It feels very unique for him, it’s quite different but at the same times, it's Cage doing what he does best, small, personal character films. The acting on the whole is great and Cage and Wood play off of each other very well, especially as everything progressively gets worse as the film goes on. It took me by surprise in the opening credits, but Jerry Lewis is in this and to the point where I said his name out loud in disbelief, it’s just crazy. Also, just on a side note, one of my friends is in this is a small role as one of the police officers, which I thought was cool haha.

The film looks great and the use of very muted colours is beautiful to look at; as well as when this is mixed with very intense, thick and bright colours in certain scenes, and given as how the setting is Vegas, it makes all the more sense. The soundtrack is also great. The film overall has a very polished look, feel and sound to it and it’s just a pleasure to watch. There’s also a point in this film where Cage does his ‘Bad Lieutenant’ laugh with a very ‘Lord of War’-esqe song playing with vibes about both films and it was a nice moment.


While I do think that the overall plot is very interesting and is handled in a unique way, something about these character’s motivations and intentions doesn’t really seem to add up. What these characters do does fit the offbeat nature of the film and I’m not against the average man trying to get his, but it just feels weird. I just don’t understand why average, nice people would suddenly get the idea that doing something like this was a good idea, especially that they’re both police officers. You could argue one of them didn’t want to do it, but still. But then again, acting on the thought of robbery isn’t exactly what anyone with a normal thought process would do; these characters are clearly deranged in some way and the tagline of the film explains what they are.

An example of the beautiful cinematography.
Source: filmandtvnow.com/

I do think the film was trying to display how out of their depth both of them were by them really having no idea what they were doing, but then again at the same time, it would feature scenes of them both like they’re professionals at what they were doing. Which I think perfectly displays both of their mindsets, deep down I think they know they have no idea what they’re doing, but they try to act cool about it. One death in particular is so cold and out of nowhere, it’s like a professional hit-man did it, it’s very well executed, very effective and quite shocking, it got me to gasp out loud.


Although there is a point where a very suspicious phone call is made and to anybody watching it’s so obvious what that person meant by ‘help’ and the fact that the character didn’t stop the call is just unbelievable, it truly does show how inept these two really are. There is also a cop that shows up at one point and questions what David (Wood) is doing. While I understand he is suspicious the longer the scene goes on, he was really unhelpful and slow at the start and could quite possibly blow their cover and his behaviour was just odd; but seeing X-Files, Mr X, himself, Steven Williams, again, was fun and he was great as always.


Ever since around the middle of last year, I always looked out for a short film, watching 2 hours worth every day can get tiring pretty quickly and that has still somewhat seeped over into this year where I am always thinking about time when I watch a show or a film, which, worrying about time, in general, has been a problem with me for at least the last two years, anyway. However, with this, I honestly wanted it to go on for a little longer just because of how interesting it was and how much fun I was having. While the ending might be a little abrupt, (and like showing your badge would really help the situation), it still wraps things up well, ends where it needed to, told the story it wanted to tell, ends immediately where that tale ends and was as long as it needed to be; it was a fun little journey wrapped up nicely in one little 93 minute package. 

Straight faced Nicolas Cage, hard at work...
Source: pbs.twimg.com

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