In a film that feels vaguely familiar and cliché, The Bag Man sets John Cusack and Robert De Niro opposite each other as a hitman and crime boss. The story is interesting enough, but at almost two hours, it's so tedious and drawn out that I couldn't wait for it to be over. And by the time it got to the end, I just didn't care.
Dragna (De Niro) tasks Jack (Cusack) with a simple job; pick up a bag and wait at a hotel for a simple pay day. The only instructions attached to this job are ridiculously simple: do not look inside the bag under any circumstances. Since this is a film, strange circumstances arise involving the bag. Jack must deal with Rivka (De Costa) suddenly appearing for reasons I still don't quite follow (because I zoned out) and various other unusual situations. For even more curious reasons, people keep dying, and I can still not quite figure out the purpose for their deaths, other than that writer-director David Grovic feels it might be fun to try and film that sort of scene.
The cinematography is horrendous, but that actually might be a blessing in disguise. Everything is so dark it's hard to tell what's going on. But since I can recall two beheadings, I'm kind of cool with that.
Cusack's performance isn't horrific, but it's not that noteworthy either. De Niro's is only worth commenting on because it's hysterical that he took the role in terms of the script and the lines that his character ends up with, particularly the monologue at the end. I think that De Costa, who plays the only female character in the film, could probably pull off a really good performance if she had any degree of substance to work with.
Overall, The Bag Man is a bizarre mess. It's interesting in its own way, but it's also a trainwreck.
