Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I kept looking at the young woman and thinking, she looks like a fuller-faced Reese Witherspoon. Turns out it was Reese Witherspoon - I hadn't looked at the cast list. The film begins with Nick (Alessandro Nivola) and his college friend Bryce (Josh Brolin) in a bar. A young woman walks by, and you can see Bryce checking her out. Nick leaves, and while he's asleep, he gets a panicked call from Bryce. The woman has threatened to call the police and claim rape. Bryce has tied her up and duct taped her mouth because he's terrified and doesn't know what to do.Eventually the film flashes back to an earlier time. When his father dies, Nick assumes his father will leave him a lot of money which will help him get out of the one-horse town in which he lives. Unfortunately, his father died and left him with nothing as he was $240,000 in debt to the IRS, plus other debts.When he gets an opportunity to make some real cash by stealing money from a drug dealer, Nick agrees. Somehow the dealer finds out he's involved and has him picked up. He tells Nick if Nick pays him back, he'll forget about what happened. Nick is frantic to get the money since he no longer has his cut.Pretty good noir with good acting. Someone here commented that Alessandro Nivola is dull. I liked him because he played the character as if he was capable of anything.Not a stretch for Reese Witherspoon; the other people were fine.I liked the film, I thought it was well done, and I like that certain things were revealed in the beginning. I loved the scene where the commercial for the recycling place came on television, and Nick is so desperate to get Bryce's back to it. Very funny.In better hands, this could have been a blockbuster. But it's still good.

Well, Reese Witherspoon is in this, Josh Brolin looks more nerdy than he ever has before or since and Pollax Troy (Alessandro Nivola) talks like a normal human being in this wannabe noir that is not quite as clever as it thinks it is.If I went through the whole plot, we could be here for a while, so, in a nutshell it's about a young couple Nick (Nivola) and Lissa (Witherspoon) who try to blackmail their friend Bryce (Brolin) into allowing them to steal a rare Abraham Lincoln signed "Bill of Release" from a mansion Bryce is minding. The path the film takes to get us into the mansion, and then out and to the finish line is particularly convoluted and, while the resolution doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, it will leave many asking "is that it?" The film has the typical late 90s indie style, with a lot happening in darkness and little lighting. Some of the staging is obvious, but is in general effective at establishing mood and maintaining the desired atmosphere.On the acting side, Nivola is a long way from Face/ Off and a lot more at home as our down-on-his-luck loser protagonist. He manages to keep his character sympathetic throughout, in spite of being a deeply flawed human being. Josh Brolin is deliberately cringeworthy as the unlikeable, socially inept Bryce, while Witherspoon is decent as Lissa, a character I had a hard time connecting with at all through no fault of hers. Every actor seems aware of the type of movie they've signed on for.Best Laid Plans is a pretty small movie, and not essential viewing, but it does do enough right to be an enjoyable viewing experience, if a little light upon repeat viewings.

**SPOILERS** Very over plotted film about a plan within a plan within a plan that in reality turns out to be no plan at all. This all has to do with this shiftless and self absorbed dude Nick, Alessandro Nivola, who's looking to hit it big on his old man's death.Nick's dad as it turned out was about as rotten and dishonest as he is. Like the saying goes the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, or in pop's case the tree is not that far from where the apple landed, in that he forfeited his six figure life insurance policy by omitting that he was suffering from liver disease which, due to a lifetime of heavy drinking, was the cause of his death. It also came to Nick's attention that his deceased dad owed the IRS $200,000.00 in back taxes which had his house, that Nick lived in and hoped to own, put on the auction block in order to pay the taxes off. Stuck working at a local recycling plant Nick wants nothing more then to quit his dead end job and go on to bigger and better, as well as easier, things. Like becoming a beachcomber on the Florida Coast with a fat bank account and stock portfolio to live off.This, Nick's future plans, as we soon see is to blow up in Nick's face when he gets involved in a robbery, with him being the wheel-man, of a local drug's dealers who's known in the movie credits as the "Bad Ass Dude", Rocky Carroll. Nick together with his two friends Barry & Jimmy, James Marsh & Terrence Howard, rip off the Bad Ass Dude's weekly take of some $40,000.00 that he left at Jimmy's place for safe keeping. As things turn out Nick ends up getting kidnapped by the Bad Ass Dude's henchmen and brought to his hideout where he's given a lesson in both economics and water-boarding. Told by the Bad Ass Dude to come back with his share of the money he ripped off him-$15,000.00-or else Nick has no choice but to get his sweet and innocent girlfriend Lissa-short for Mellisa- played by the cute and sexy Reese Witherspoor involved in order to save his own sorry and pathetic behind. The plan that both Nick and Lissa cook up is to get Nick's rich collage buddy, who just happens to be visiting, Bryce, Josh Brolin, into a very compromising position so that he'll pay anything, including the $15,000.00 that Nick's owes the Bad Ass Dude, to get out of.***SPOILERS*** The brutal and very economically conscious Bad Ass Dude gives himself away right from the get go in his very elaborate and deep understanding of the US as well as the world's economic conditions. He struck me as just the kind of guy that's needed to get the United States, as well as world, economy back on its feet and out of this now raging 1930's like economic recession. This made me wonder why he's in the dangerous business, where one's average life expectancy is rarely over 30, of drug dealing in the first place! As for the sniveling and wetting in his pants Bryce, in him being set up on a rape and murder charge by Nick & Lissa, you could only hope that he learns something from all this by realizing that being the selfish jerk that he is, as was all his life, can result into serious consequences that he can't either pay or lie his way out of. And when it came to Lissa she by far was the most ridicules of the lot in her actions at the end of the movie, in regard to her sleazy boyfriend Nick, that made me wonder if the psychical trauma that she suffered throughout the film effected her mind as well as her body!

Having met his old buddy Bryce for the first time in years for a drink, Nick gets a call from him in the middle of night asking for help. He goes to Bryce's place where he gets told that Bryce pulled a girl that night, took her home, started messing around and then had sex. However immediately after sex the girl says that she is going to the police to tell them that she was raped. Bryce then takes Nick downstairs where he has the girl tied to a billiard table to prevent her leaving. The two men try to work out what they are going to do, but are things what they seem?Opening with an interesting set-up, this film jumps back in time and immediately undoes itself with a plot that is interesting but not as good as it really should have been. The plot follows the fall of Nick as he needs more money to cover firstly the dreams he has and then the problems he gets into when he tries to get the money by crime. Essentially this film could have been a mix of Tarantino, Mamet and Usual Suspects twists but it falls short of any of those targets but still manages to produce a reasonably good drama with elements of each. The plot isn't as good once it jumps back four months although it still has enough movement to keep things going. The twists are not that great and the plot itself doesn't make as much logical sense as it would like to think that it does. Nor is it as clever as it would like to think – the small town America was well painted but the work on the characters was not as good.Nivola leads the cast well with a nice performance of subtlety even if the material isn't always there for him. Witherspoon walks the film rather easily with a simple role that only really gets interesting towards the end. Of the rest of the cast Brolin is OK, Howard makes a solid appearance and generally everyone else turns in solid performances. It was a film that I felt the characters could have been more important and better developed but they were still good enough for the cast to work with.Overall this is a fairly typical thriller with a twist. It seems to want to be a bit like Tarantino with the dialogue edge of Mamet and the twists of things like Suspects but it doesn't really get close to any of them. Still, it produces an engaging thriller that, although not original, is distracting at least.